One good thing pre-modern societies did better than us is take luck a lot more seriously. The content of superstitions and astrology etc does not matter. What matters is that it occupies headspace that would otherwise get filled by false confidence in causality.
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Superstitions are like intellectual styrofoam. They fill the empty spaces of unknowns and hold space for doubt, but without the stress of felt uncertainty and the urge to overindex on what you can explain reasonably.
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In the west “luck” in everyday life (not lotteries) has been reduced to cute theatrical rituals, phatic speech, and astrology etc as a sort of comicbook fandom.
In Asia, it still suffuses life as a scaffolding of ceremony structuring everyday life with taboos, ceremonies etc.
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How do you hold space for luck in postmodern conditions?
This might be the overarching question that has been driving me these last few years.
The best known answer so far is shitposting. Which explains why even powerful people try it. Everybody needs to make luck.
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But I do it for fun. I don’t believe it’s a potent enough luck conjuring mechanism to do for that reason. Shitposting is like astrology. It’s fun to believe it works to wrangle luck. And sometimes that belief is all you need.
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that's my point... the inscrutability of divine intentions makes the causality entirely theoretical and the practical effect being embrace of randomness and luck...you pray, god mysteriously decides in a causal way whether to answer, and your randomness becomes divine intention
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A contrarian take: It is better to blindly over-believe in causality because it mentally connects your expected outcomes to your actions. This means that it strengthens your incentive to do things that will benefit you. Ex: If I work hard I will succeed vs I might succeed.
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We think we have replaced the uncertainty placeholders of religion and magic, but everything we have ever learned or will ever learn occupies the same space
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