- Paper: Why Being Wrong Can Be Right: Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs
- Summary:
- Bullet-proofing magic (gri gri) is relatively common in sub-Saharan Africa
- This bullet-proofing magic does not work - if you get shot while wearing gri gri, you will still be shot
- So why does belief in gri gri persist?
- Belief in gri gri lowers the barriers to collective action, and makes more people in the village fight to defend it
- Therefore, due to group selection, villages with belief in gri gri survive and thrive, whereas villages without belief in gri gri die out
- Look at the phenomenon from the perspective of the state:
- In the absence of a scientific paper explaining why a belief in gri gri is beneficial, people would characterized gri gri as “stupid” or “irrational”
- Even with the paper, modernizers might look for ways to preserve the benefits of gri gri without its harmful elements
- The problem is that there’s no way to isolate gri gri from the broader worldview that holds faith in village elders and witch doctors
- This illustrates a more important general concept: metis is both actions and worldview
- You cannot change the actions without altering the worldview
- Altering the worldview necessarily changes the actions
- Economics and politics doesn’t consider individual psychological states
- Efficiency, money, goods, are only valuable insofar as they make people more happy
- The problem is that it’s a lot easier to optimize for money, goods, etc. than it is to optimize for happiness
- Therefore, we optimize for those things far beyond the point to which they bring additional happiness (and indeed to the point where they start reducing happiness)
- People join institutions for psychological reasons, and the material benefits those institutions bring are a happy side-effect
- Not all customs that increase psychological happiness improve people’s economic productivity
- Those customs are selected against by market economies