Magical Thinking, Mundanical Thinking

We’re all familiar with the problem of magical thinking. Magical thinking is generally used to refer to superstitious beliefs which ignore basic things like causation or evidence. But we can expand the definition slightly, to encompass any belief which ignores reason or evidence in favour of something nice, or comforting, or optimistic. (This is sometimes called wishful thinking but I irrationally like the feel of ‘magical’ as a cover-all term). A good example of this is the belief that human history will necessarily turn out well; that it is inconceivable for humanity to drive ourselves extinct or otherwise royally screw-up our future. In many cases it can involve a kind of positive fatalism: “things will turn out okay”, “God has a Plan”, or “lots of bad things like extreme poverty have been decreasing for a long time so things will probably just keep getting better and we don’t need to worry too much about existential risks” (looking at you Steven Pinker). Magical thinking often involves a poorly considered, naive optimism that spares the details in favour of fantasy.

This might sound like an invented position, but I’ve certainly heard people say things like “if women were in charge of countries, there would be no war/carbon emissions/other generic bad-but-challenging problem”. I hope that everyone reading this can see what a leap that is. Coordination problems are about more than testosterone, even if testosterone does in fact make these situations significantly worse. It would be one thing to argue that there would be less war with women in charge, but no war? If only world peace were so easy. Similarly, for decade after decade New-Agers have been saying things to the effect of “we’re seeing an awakening of higher consciousness in humanity - humanity is collectively shifting its energy into an enlightened state”. Well, few people seem to have gotten the memo: as far as I can tell, there are just as many psychopaths and bullies as sixty years ago during the birth of the New Age movement. These people don’t seem to be able to explain why humanity is ‘waking up to cosmic consciousness’. This is the critical hallmark of magical thinking: an inability to consider why or how Nice-Thing X will come about. Often when people accuse someone of being ‘utopian’ this is what they mean. To be utopian, in the colloquial sense, is to imagine or advocate for a wonderful world with no consideration for whether it could ever be realised.

There is a subtler kind of magical thinking however, which has a different failure mode. Sometimes when people dismiss the possibility of superintelligent AI ever being created, or say society in 500 years will definitely look very similar to our current civilisation, they’re employing magical thinking in the service of the mundane. Unlike the people who look around and see the glimmerings of the inevitable Second Coming of Christ, these people look around at suburbs and jobs and countries and money and all sorts of currently normal things and think “Thus Has It Always Been And Thus Shall It Ever Be.” Psychologists call this ‘normalcy bias’ when applied specifically to individuals discounting threat warnings. But, in keeping with our quirky naming traditions, we might call this broader bias mundanical thinking. It may seem more sane than regular magical thinking, because it’s grounded in current reality. However, it is identical in its failure to utilise reason or evidence to consider the possibility that things might be significantly different in the future. When we are caught in mundanical thinking, we don’t bother explaining why or how things are supposed to remain like they are at present, we just assume it. Often this even involves actively discounting evidence to the contrary.

(Observant readers may notice that mundanical thinking is roughly the descriptive cousin of the prescriptive ‘status quo bias’, wherein one is biased towards preferring the current state of affairs. It’s also roughly the global version of the ‘end of history illusion’ wherein you are biased towards thinking that you will change much less in the future than you have in the past).

Mundanical thinking isn’t always as bold as claims like “capitalism will be around forever”. Sometimes it sneaks into otherwise sincere future forecasting. As steam engines and then internal combustion engines began to be developed in Europe, people began to imagine the future of individual transportation. Some people scoffed at the idea that something as fundamental to society as horses would ever be replaced as a method of transportation. But more sophisticated futurologists recognised the revolutionary potential of non-biological engines. “In the future,” some proclaimed, “carriages will be pulled not by horses but by mechanical horses driven by powerful engines.” Clearly, it was too much of a leap to imagine a carriage disposing of horses altogether. Even when people imagine technological revolutions, they often think through the lens of the current world. The population of horses hit its peak in around 1920, and by 1930 automobiles surpassed horses in number.

I think that mundanical thinking is actually more dangerous than magical thinking, largely because it is both more ubiquitous and more difficult to notice. We tend to be stuck in an eternal present, forgetting that if we brought a hunter-gatherer into modern New York he would scream and faint. To us, this is normal, the way things have always been. Changes in technology, politics, and culture happen slowly enough that we are able to absorb them into our model of the mundane. It takes a calamitous rift in the world for most people to recognise that their idea of ‘normal’ was flawed. Sam Harris has mentioned 9/11 as the moment he realised that he was actually living in history: that the world is still unfolding and that ‘normality’ is not stable. But no matter how many times we’re hit over the head with the fact that the world can change drastically, human beings tend to forget. We may pay lip-service to ‘technological development’ or ‘the ongoing risk of nuclear war’ or ‘the end of global poverty’, but often we don’t really believe what we say. A nuclear war couldn’t really happen anytime soon, right? AI won’t really ever be able to outperform humans at everything, will it? Serious pandemics aren’t really possible in the twenty-first century, are they?

(Oops).

I think it's good to have a name for this bias (if there isn’t already one that I’m unaware of). Mundanical thinking works for me, because it involves the same kind of naive leap as magical thinking, just directed towards the ‘normal’ rather than the ‘nice’. It’s certainly better than my first naming attempt (‘contemporocentrism’, named after anthropocentrism).

The next time you notice anyone (including yourself) skipping over the task of actually thinking about the future with the assumption that the world is probably destined to remain just as it is, ask yourself: am I thinking mundanically?