Submitted 1 day ago by xkcdbot@lemmy.world [bot] to xkcd@lemmy.world
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/superstition.png
Title text:
It’s important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That’s what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I’d said rabbit rabbit that year!
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: xkcd.com/3191/
Somebody set a reminder to make sure this person says “rabbit rabbit” next January 1. We don’t need another year like this one.
It’s because we’re just pattern recognition machines and a false positive is better than a false negative.
So if an act might result in a positive or avoid a negative, it’s safer to just do it anyways. Giving people who get neurotic about it enough of an evolutionary advantage that it’s still relatively normal human variation.
Maybe the environment changes to where that OCD behavior is really advantageous, then the rabbit rabbits will inherit the earth.
You will love this:
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
This originates from a Nickelodeon gap-filler series btw
Very superstitious…
Writing’s on the wall
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
ok, I have to address the elephant in the room: is the bad image quality intentional (part of the joke) or not or what is going on here?
in case it gets fixed, here it is right now:
Image
TIL that there is a 2x size version of many xkcd comics, which the explainxkcd bot seems to have downloaded and which looks a lot better: www.explainxkcd.com/…/File:superstition_2x.png / imgs.xkcd.com/comics/superstition_2x.png
Bubs@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
Image
(The post is still showing the pixelated image for me)
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
By “the post” what do you mean? The one in my comment is obviously the pixelated one, I am going to keep it that way for future documentation; the one on xkcd.com has however been fixed.