Peter Grant wrote a guest column on Sarah Hoyt’s blog about beliefs and superstitions. Really, read the whole thing.

After demonstrating magical thinking by educated Africans, Grant turns it around to us:

Most First World people of my acquaintance – in Africa, Europe and the USA – regard primitive superstitions as arrant nonsense, without any basis in ‘scientific reality’. I take malicious delight in pointing out to them that they live in societies and cultures where:

– the daily horoscope is essential reading for many people;

– homeopathy is accepted by millions as a valid form of medical treatment, despite it being categorically and incontrovertibly ridiculous from any normative scientific perspective; and

– people pointlessly and repeatedly sound their vehicles’ horns in traffic jams, apparently in the belief that by doing so they’ll somehow magically make the vehicles around them start moving again.

So much for scientific reality . . .

BTW, pick up Grant’s books, Take the Star Road and Ride the Rising Tide. Bery good SF.