IIRC that was a news article about a tribal dustup in which someone had subscribed to a belief that a ritual would make them invulnerable to buillets, somewhere in Africa it was, and then they put their superstition to a material test and were killed in consequence, as one might have expected. Quite silly, but if you start off from a false architecture you end up with a lot of bad design. Every belief you embrace has consequences, and the human mind is a little bit sloppy about thinking them through before throwing themselves in boots and all to one that comes around.

This raises an amusing thought. Beliefs at all levels of cognition are for trade all over the place wherever one or more people talk -- swapping, or giving, or enforcing them is mankind's most widely loved sport. If only we could quantify it as we do, say, sow belly futures or the price of sorghum, what an interesting ebb and flow the numbers would reveal!!


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