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How superstitious should NPCs be?

Not at all -- NPCs doing dumb things would weaken the challenge of the game.
Total votes: 6 (8%)
A little bit -- it would help make the social world feel more plausible.
Total votes: 63 (81%)
Very superstitious -- it would be fun to see NPCs doing crazy things.
Total votes: 9 (12%)
Total votes: 78
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Re: Very Superstitious

#46
In culture, superstitions are born in a populations young age. They are not necessarily grown out of when that culture progresses.

What makes sense to me would be that a new colony might gain a superstition, and that superstition have a chance of developing in that population. The more isolated they are, the longer they can retain it. Sometimes interaction with outside world is just as effective against superstition as aging culturally.

It's kind of like prejudice, or religion. It weakens the earlier that colony interacts with one of differing views, while growing stronger if there is little contact made. Eventually it could be so strong that contact with a disagreeing population could very well start a feud.
"I wish that I could turn back time 'cause now all the guilt is mine
can't live without the trust from those you love"
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Re: Very Superstitious

#47
Hadrianus wrote:Third I said more inclined towards superstition not more superstitious, those are two different things.
a) no they're not.

b) aside from prejudice on your part, what possible, evidence-based justification do you have for claiming other cultures are more superstitious than us? We have horoscopes, scientology, homeopathy, several major world religions of our own, beliefs in our national greatness or the myths underpinning our historical stories of expansion and empire, plus a tendency to go and appropriate symbolism from other cultures and paste them over vague notions of spirituality because we also seem to believe that exotic cultures are more primitive and therefore spiritual than us.

White people be hanging dream catchers in their cars, dude.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#48
ThymineC wrote:
Hadrianus wrote:We? Who is "we" ? Or are you using the "Royal we" to describes yourself?
He's talking about you. You said:
Hadrianus wrote:On earth you see that the poorer and less educated a country becomes the more the population is inclined to believe all sort of nonsense.
Populations tend to be made up of a fair number of people.
Please elaborate! I don't think I'm getting what you are trying to say.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#49
McDuff wrote:
Hadrianus wrote:Third I said more inclined towards superstition not more superstitious, those are two different things.
a) no they're not.

b) aside from prejudice on your part, what possible, evidence-based justification do you have for claiming other cultures are more superstitious than us? We have horoscopes, scientology, homeopathy, several major world religions of our own, beliefs in our national greatness or the myths underpinning our historical stories of expansion and empire, plus a tendency to go and appropriate symbolism from other cultures and paste them over vague notions of spirituality because we also seem to believe that exotic cultures are more primitive and therefore spiritual than us.

White people be hanging dream catchers in their cars, dude.
a) Evidence to the contrary please! Your word does not count as such.
b) Again with the "us/we" who is this "us/we"? If you mean third world versus first world I'm sorry that is not what I meant. If I gave that impression than that is my mistake. I was talking in therms of well educated versus badly educated. Both classes of people can be found in both the first and third world. Though let us be honest as a percentage of the population the first world is more educated. No offence intended to third world countries
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Re: Very Superstitious

#50
You want "evidence"? Do you mean you want me to show my working out? That's not something one needs "evidence" for. Use your words.

As others have pointed out, when dealing with a population, "tendency towards" is measured by the actual manifestation of the thing which one has a tendency towards. If you have a population in which you claim there is a "tendency towards" eating meat, and when I arrive I see they are all vegetarians, I will question your hypothesis.

As far as "education works against superstitious beliefs," I would like to, once again, point out that cultural norms mean many things that could easily be classed as superstitions or even religions are accepted as normal behaviour for western individuals and thus not measured in the research. I would also like to point out Kahneman's research showing that for a number of common cognitive biases, education can have minimal impact on our accuracy. This can even count for education in a field which you'd expect it to matter, such as statistical training.

If we consider "superstition" to be a result of the universally-observed human tendency towards drawing too-strong conclusions from incomplete information, and thus an artefact of an evolved problem-solving method that selected more for quick abstract heuristic reasoning to generate conclusions quickly, it's basically unreasonable to say that people from those places are any more likely to fall into those traps than enlightened, educated westerners. Education simply doesn't make that much difference to the basic framework of our thinking process.

And if you need further evidence that we're not as smart as we think we are, read the op-ed page of the New York Times.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#51
McDuff wrote:You want "evidence"? Do you mean you want me to show my working out? That's not something one needs "evidence" for. Use your words.

As others have pointed out, when dealing with a population, "tendency towards" is measured by the actual manifestation of the thing which one has a tendency towards. If you have a population in which you claim there is a "tendency towards" eating meat, and when I arrive I see they are all vegetarians, I will question your hypothesis.

As far as "education works against superstitious beliefs," I would like to, once again, point out that cultural norms mean many things that could easily be classed as superstitions or even religions are accepted as normal behaviour for western individuals and thus not measured in the research. I would also like to point out Kahneman's research showing that for a number of common cognitive biases, education can have minimal impact on our accuracy. This can even count for education in a field which you'd expect it to matter, such as statistical training.

If we consider "superstition" to be a result of the universally-observed human tendency towards drawing too-strong conclusions from incomplete information, and thus an artefact of an evolved problem-solving method that selected more for quick abstract heuristic reasoning to generate conclusions quickly, it's basically unreasonable to say that people from those places are any more likely to fall into those traps than enlightened, educated westerners. Education simply doesn't make that much difference to the basic framework of our thinking process.

And if you need further evidence that we're not as smart as we think we are, read the op-ed page of the New York Times.
So from your words the conclusion I should draw is that superstitions are influenced by nothing? Because if that is what you are saying I'm going to have to mock you? If not then please state what has a negative influence over superstitious beliefs if anything?
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Re: Very Superstitious

#52
Hadrianus wrote:
ThymineC wrote:
Hadrianus wrote:We? Who is "we" ? Or are you using the "Royal we" to describes yourself?
He's talking about you. You said:
Hadrianus wrote:On earth you see that the poorer and less educated a country becomes the more the population is inclined to believe all sort of nonsense.
Populations tend to be made up of a fair number of people.
Please elaborate! I don't think I'm getting what you are trying to say.
Assume the existence of two individuals, X and Y, who are from different countries, XLand and YLand. Let's say that individuals from YLand have a higher inclination to be superstitious - say people from XLand have "40% probability of being superstitious" (whatever that means) and people from YLand have 60% probability.

Now, odds are that Y will be superstitious, and X won't be. But that could very easily not be the case either - maybe neither are, both are, or X is and Y isn't. There's a 24% chance of the first case, 24% chance of the second case, and 16% chance of the third case.

But now let's consider this same argument being applied over a population. Assume XLand and YLand both have populations of 1000 people. We will also assume that people form their beliefs independently of what others in their country believe. In that case, we can model the number of superstitious people in XLand ~ Bin(1000, 0.4) and YLand ~ Bin(1000, 0.6).

What is the probability that YLand has more superstitious people than XLand? In fact, let's change this to "what is the probability that XLand has at least as many superstitious people as YLand?" We can posit two random variables based on these binomial distributions:

A <- Bin(1000, 0.4)
B <- Bin(1000, 0.6)

And then what we essentially want is the probability that A >= B i.e. P(A - B >= 0)

According to the top answer of this post, we find that the Hoeffding bound of P can be expressed as:

P(A - B >= 0) <= exp( -0.5*1000*(0.6 - 0.4)^2 )

We know that if P represents the probability that XLand has at least as many superstitious people as YLand, then Q = 1 - P must give the probability that YLand has more superstitious people than XLand.

Therefore:

Q = 1 - exp( -0.5*1000*(0.6 - 0.4)^2 )
= 0.99999999793

That means there's a 99.999999793% chance that YLand will contain more superstitious people than XLand given the stated probabilities of superstitiousness among individuals and the given population of each country.

Furthermore, we see that as the size of the populations get larger, the Hoeffding bound of P shrinks to zero and Q tends to 1 (certainty). I.e.:

lim[n->infinity](1 - exp( -0.5n(0.6 - 0.4)^2 )) = 1

=> lim[n->infinity](Q) = 1

Basically, stating that the "inclination of individuals within country X is to be more superstitious" is, for all practical purposes, the same as stating "there are more superstitious people in country X".

QED.

Gonna get dinner.

Edit: Accidentally wrote one word in place of another in a way that might have caused offence. Corrected.
Last edited by ThymineC on Thu Apr 10, 2014 12:07 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#55
I am afraid that the level of math you were speaking in is above my head. It hurts to say/type that but here it is. To be blunt I have no idea what you were talking about.
But let me ask you the same question I asked McDuff, what has a negative influence over superstitious beliefs? That is to say what causes superstitious beliefs to be less likely?
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Re: Very Superstitious

#57
Hadrianus wrote:I am afraid that the level of math you were speaking in is above my head. It hurts to say/type that but here it is. To be blunt I have no idea what you were talking about.
Yeah but I mean, under all that maths, it's intuitively a pretty simple idea....
Hadrianus wrote:But let me ask you the same question I asked McDuff, what has a negative influence over superstitious beliefs? That is to say what causes superstitious beliefs to be less likely?
I guess higher intelligence, the degree of knowledge about scientific principles, and the level of access to information about the world that's based on empirical investigation would all negatively correlate with superstitiousness. Don't quote me on that, though.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#59
Hadrianus wrote:So basically intelligence and education would have a negative correlation with superstitious beliefs?
Was that not one of my points when I said that less educated people are more likely to be superstitious? In which case what was that argument all about?
That's your argument with McDuff, not with me.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#60
ThymineC wrote:
Hadrianus wrote:So basically intelligence and education would have a negative correlation with superstitious beliefs?
Was that not one of my points when I said that less educated people are more likely to be superstitious? In which case what was that argument all about?
That's your argument with McDuff, not with me.
My mistake!

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