Call Your Local Wizard

https://slate.com/culture/2024/05/witches-wizards-magic-middle-ages-cunning-folk-book.html

by drdee • 2 years ago

73 40 2 years ago

slate.com

koolala• 2 years ago

Universal eclipse coming up

swayvil3• 2 years ago

And the 13 year and 17 year cicada swarms are at their 300 year coincidence.

It's a sure sign of something

Terr_2• 2 years ago

No, the thing in the news right now is that a certain number of plants will form a rough line as seen from the earth, which just means they're all in the same general direction.

It is not a syzygy, nobody's eclipsing anybody.

https://www.theplanetstoday.com/

codelobe• 2 years ago

a certain number of plants will form a rough line as seen from the earth

Ah, a fellow galactic hitchhicker. I too am a fan of dead-reaconeering in favor of astrolabian navigation.

topherclay• 2 years ago

Rather coyly, Stanmore refuses to weigh in on the efficacy of such spells. “It is not my place to say whether the magic practiced by cunning folk was real,” she writes: “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.” She does propose that all of their fellow citizens believed in the cunning folk’s powers. Many magicians had excellent reputations in the art of finding buried treasure or directing the outcome of lawsuits, and she maintains that this could only be the result of a consistent record of success.

That last line of this quote and the first line of this quote sound to me like they contradict each other.

wavemode• 2 years ago

You can have a consistent reputation for success without having real magical powers.

Being lucky is an option. ("I shall cause it to rain" and it just so happens to rain.)

Outsmarting your client is another option. ("I shall cause it to rain... tomorrow" - meanwhile, you have used meteorology to predict that it will rain tomorrow.

Lies and rumors are a third option. ("That magician can make it rain! I saw it with my own eyes!" meanwhile it's actually just a baseless rumor which has circulated around town for a while.)

TrainedMonkey• 2 years ago

Confirmation bias is a thing. If you believe that magical powers are real you will find a way to explain away when it does not work while celebrating loudly when it does. For example if your wizard cannot cause rain it's because the curse is too powerful etc. Additionally growing up with something, such as when everyone around you believes something, makes it somewhat unlikely that you will question it. Finally, if everyone around you believes something there is strong pressure to do the same thing to fit in.

I have a theory that a lot of mental biases could be explained by energy minimization - changing beliefs requires brain reconfiguration which is expensive, so we tend not to do it... unless it's imperative to survival.

empath75• 2 years ago

People who do that kind of thing for a living are very good at setting low expectations for success and blaming outside forces for failures and taking credit for every lucky hit. Dowsers, cold readers, etc.. it hasn't changed for centuries and con artists and magicians use all the same techniques today.

interroboink• 2 years ago

This reminds me of the story of Fermi and the "great generals"[1]:

  During the Second World War, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked General
  Leslie Groves how many generals might be called ‘great’, and
  why. Groves replied that any general who won five major battles in a
  row might be called ‘great’, and that about 3 in every 100 would
  qualify. Fermi countered that if opposing forces are roughly equal,
  the odds are 1 in 2 that a general will win one battle, 1 in 4 that he
  will win two battles in a row, 1 in 8 for three battles, 1 in 16 for
  four battles, and 1 in 32 for five battles in a row. ‘So you are
  right, General, about three in a hundred. Mathematical probability,
  not genius’.

[1] quoted from (PDF): https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

amingilani• 2 years ago

Reminds me of this old con idea. Get a mailing list of 1024 people, send half an email that the market will go up, and half that it will go down.

The next day, half of them will see you got the prediction correct. Of those, send a further half a prediction that it will go up, and the other half that it will go down.

After 7 total rounds you’ll have 16 people that have seen you consistently predict the market for 7 days.

Sell them your next prediction.

stevenAthompson4• 2 years ago

Later the article discusses how some of those results were achieved via the application of psychology, which does explain why some might have excellent records of success.

swayvil3• 2 years ago

The same could be said of any technology.

m463• 2 years ago

(can't help but think of the fixer in pulp fiction)

VINCENT: I said a "please" would be nice.

the Wolf takes a step towards him

THE WOLF: Set it straight, Buster. I'm not here to say "please". I'm here to tell you what to do. And if self-preservation is an instinct you possess, you better fuckin' do it and do it quick. I'm here to help. If my help's not appreciated, lotsa luck gentlemen.

JULES: It ain't that way, Mr. Wolf. Your help is definitely appreciated.

VINCENT: I don't mean any disrespect. I just don't like people barkin' orders at me.

THE WOLF: If I'm curt with you, it's because time is a factor. I think fast, I talk fast, and I need you guys to act fast if you want to get out of this. So pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the fuckin' car.

utensil4778• 2 years ago

Those statements are not mutually exclusive. Whether or not the magic was real, people at the time believed it was real. Some practitioners clearly were successful in some manner, be it with magical or practical means

mrkeen• 2 years ago

Stanmore refuses to weigh in on the efficacy of such spells. “It is not my place to say whether the magic practiced by cunning folk was real,” she writes: “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.”

Ok...

Many magicians had excellent reputations in the art of finding buried treasure or directing the outcome of lawsuits, and she maintains that this could only be the result of a consistent record of success.

So you do believe but it's too shameful to admit.

mbreese• 2 years ago

It doesn’t have to be “real” for people to believe it is real. And really, it doesn’t matter if it was “real” if people believed it was real.

Because if people believe something is real, it can have a real world impact, regardless of whether or not the “magic” was “real”.

People are strange like that and medieval people would have been no different from us in this regard.

aaplok• 2 years ago

Many magicians had excellent reputations [...] She maintains that this could only be the result of a consistent record of success.

For a modern version of this phenomenon, check out any discussion about chatGPT here on HN. Things haven't changed all that much.

thcipriani• 2 years ago

I had the same thought. People know that ChatGPT is completely fallible—prone to hallucination, etc—yet people continue to abuse it to do things it's incapable of doing—write a legal brief, create an A paper, etc. This is the same magical thinking that would lead someone to consult a wizard.

TeMPOraL4• 2 years ago

No, that's just you dissing a tool by playing up its imperfections. Some people do what you say. Others, and I imagine most ChatGPT users that also hang out on HN are like that, recognize the tool is fallible, but also that for many tasks, it's orders of magnitude easier to check a solution than to come up with one from scratch. Even >50% rate of failure is fine - you can retry your query four times, mash the responses into something serviceable, and sand off the rough edges yourself; it's still easier and faster than doing it yourself from scratch.

Or put another way: you bet I'd go to my local wizard if magic was real and they were half-competent at wielding it. Now, magic isn't real, but GPT-4 being better at almost everything than any single human, is a trivially verifiable fact.

Or put yet another way: most software devs are fallible and half-competent at what they do; this doesn't stop the world from making software.

graemep• 2 years ago

The subheading and parts of the article itself emphasise the medieval, while the period covered is mostly early modern, just overlapping with the very end of the medieval.

I wonder if it is avoiding the disquieting thought that belief in magic is more of a modern than medieval characteristic? No only was it openly believed in during early modern times, but it is still believed in although most people do not call it magic - it is usually disguised with some kind of talk of things like "energy" or a pseudo scientific wrapper.

Call Your Local Wizard

Related Stories