When you believe in things that you don’t understand, Then you suffer, Superstition ain’t the way

– Stevie Wonder

Every time I write about the mechanical processes behind this blog, I stop adding entries to it. Recognizing a pattern is the first part of building a superstition. It’s also the first part of building a hypothesis, because the two processes are one and the same. Humans love to recognize patterns. We have special names for some of them – pareidolia, recognizing faces where they don’t exist. Paranoia, seeing enemies where they don’t exist. If you think of these as distortions of helpful evolved processes, then superstition is just a general phenomenon of seizing on the wrong explanation for an interesting pattern.