Magick of Thought

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

Update: Ananael filled me in on some backstory of the quote. Apparently, it was intended to be satire. Looks like I’ve fallen into the trap of taking a satire seriously and railing against it. My bad. I’m leaving the posts up because (1) I believe in owning up to mistakes, not covering them up, and (2) these posts might be useful someday, when I have some legit word games to call BS on.

Yesterday’s post about calling BS on faux-wisdom didn’t come out quite right. I focused on how to recognize it, not why calling BS is important. But I think this topic is important, so I’m going to take another shot.

I’ll post about quartz later today, too.

There are some statements that are concrete and fair, but simply inaccurate. “Magick works by known psychological principles (your love spell gave you the confidence to talk to people), or by placebo.” The person is making a strong, factual statement, which they presumably believe. The correct response is to respectfully cite experiences and results that are inconsistent with their belief, to change their mind.

Then there are statements that are intentionally hard to pin down, like “Magick is all in your mind, but you have no idea how big your mind is. It includes everything around you.” Here, the person is not trying to explain their view of magick as clearly as possible. No, they’re playing word games, sounding like they’re saying one thing, then re-defining a word to say something completely different, so it sounds deep without really saying anything.

Even if you can’t say why, faux-wisdom doesn’t sound quite right. It makes science-minded people not take the speaker seriously. And established, widely-repeated faux-wisdom makes the whole community look bad.

Mostly, we encounter inaccurate but sincere beliefs, presented as well as the writer can manage. And so, our default response is respectful disagreement. Which is a good thing: We all benefit by having discussions rather than flame wars, and I’ve been glad for that tone in my comments.

But that doesn’t work for intentionally-confusing faux-wisdom. The meaning will shift throughout the discussion, and you just wind up talking in the same circles as the original speaker. Like arguing with a fool (“Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” -Mark Twain), listeners can’t tell who’s the charlatan and who’s the one trying to speak clearly. The person spouting the faux-wisdom gets to feel wise for having a “deep, thought-provoking discussion.” (You’ve heard that response, haven’t you?) Logically refuting faux-wisdom won’t get rid of it.

I think there’s a parallel with televised debates between biologists and creationists, where simply entering the debate was the wrong move, though I can’t quite pin down the analogy.

That’s why we need to simply call BS on fake wisdom, particularly when it comes from an established, respected source.

To quote myself from the comments: If it were a non-writer or a new blogger, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. But when an established writer starts a popular meme by speaking in circles, I think we need to address what he said, not what he meant, and call BS. (He’s a professional writer, so we can assume he knows how to write clearly, and simply chose not to). The problem isn’t the idea itself, it’s the word-games and circular logic in the presentation.

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

One last update: Ananael filled me in on some backstory of the quote. Apparently, it was intended to be satire. Looks like I’ve fallen into the trap of taking a satire seriously and railing against it. My bad. I’m leaving the posts up because (1) I believe in owning up to mistakes, not covering them up, and (2) these posts might be useful someday, when I have some legit word games to call BS on.

Note: Read this post first, it explains why calling BS matters.

I’d written this a few weeks ago, but never posted it. The experiments on quartz will resume tomorrow.

Sometimes, bullshit is a perfect example for showing how fake wisdom works, so you can recognize it quickly in the future. That’s what today’s post is about.

Frater SeA and Strategic Sorcery had a discussion about, “All that magick changes is you.” Someone else said it, they were discussing it.

If it meant, “Magick is just placebo and personal growth,” I’ll disagree, but I wouldn’t call BS. But the person who originally said it meant something like, “Magick only changes you, but we’re all one, and we’re all part of God, so really, you are everything around you.” Which is, like, totally deep, man.

Wait, no, sorry, not deep. The word I meant was bullshit.

Neither Frater SeA or Jason of Strategic Sorcery made the initial statement, and Jason discussed how it was a bad model, but they both treated it more seriously than it deserves. So, allow me to call BS, and show you why, so you can call BS on fake wisdom, too.

When you hear “Magick only changes you,” it sounds like the person is making a strong, concrete statement about the limitations of magick. No external changes.

Then you hear the re-definition: By ‘you’ they mean “Everything around you.” Now it sounds doubly-deep. Because you’re not just you, you’re, like, everything, man.

Specifically, it sounds deep because of the inconsistency between the standard definition of ‘you,’ and the re-definition of ‘you.’ Because humans don’t immediately replace words with definitions. No, when we hear the sentence, we react to the standard definitions of all the words, and only later does the logical mind kick in to do the translation.

Here’s a more obvious example, so you can see how replacing a definition works: Let’s say my friend, Bob, wants to give a futuristic-sounding talk, but he doesn’t really know anything. So he re-defines “car” to mean “Vehicle that transports people.” Then he talks about “water-faring cars” and “flying cars” and so on. It requires a conscious step to translate “flying car” into “airplane,” so you imagine a Jetsons car every time, even before you really process what he said. Translating into normal English takes effort, and dispelling that futuristic feeling takes effort, so most listeners don’t bother. And Bob gets to sound like he’s talking about a futuristic world, when he’s really just discussing 747s.

Try this: Replace the word with the definition. “Magick only changes your body plus everything around you.” Yeah, not so deeply-mystically-wise anymore, huh?

And that’s why it’s bullshit: It sounds deep and meaningful, but once you sort through the word games, it’s not really saying anything.

After writing this, but before I posted it, others weighed in too. Ananael does an excellent job of analyzing the “you are everything” model, though I think taking it seriously in the first place is a mistake. RO takes it seriously, disagrees with the idea, but doesn’t quite call BS. And Patrick Dunn makes a nice rimshot, which I think is roughly the right response.