How was that?

By the way, I would have thought that the UV light that fades the rug would be the same UV light that kills the midew, in both cases by busting up chemical bonds in complex molecules.

Somebody please explain to me what is wrong here.

I still can’t see how it makes more sense if read as sarcasm. Your writing style is quite obscure to me at times.

Another fetish is attributing everything to genes. So, you can pick: Your child burps up half its milk … is that because you need a new bottle or because of genes?

Each underlying theme allows to predict the next irrational statement. We can see the cranberry juice comments coming before they are made, we know our friend Ruth will not watch a new Scorcese picture and we know Joe will never order the buffalo burger.

SOmeone’s suggestion that we had “fetishized pre-requisites” meant that we were making very strong assumption about an important feature of something and then drawing (in this case costly) conclusions from those assumptions, without testing the assumptions at all … and indeed, this would have been part of a larger fetish: All the usual expectations of hither education … that 120 credits = a bachelor’s degree but 110 does not, that “majoring” required specific courses and 40 credits (or whatever) of concentration, and so on and so forth.

We actually tested the value of pre=-reqs, and discovered that they were useless. Not unimportant, just useless the way we had implemented them. We had assumed their importance because they are part of the system and questioning them is questioning general knowledge.

In discussions of education we see the concept of “process over facts” fetishized. You can’t have a conversation of 10 or more people about K-12 education without someone saying “the problem these days is that they teach facts and not process” … and that is typically said by someone who is not an educator and has not been in a classroom for 30 years, but everyone will nod, accepting it uncritically, despite the fact that in most progressive states teaching process has been a thrust of change in all curriculum development for decades. As a society critical of education we have fetishized that concept.

We see the interest of the “all suffering taxpayer fetishized in politics. We see “free speech” fetishized all over the place on the internet … uncritically an hypertonically overvalued and centralized without argument.

Both terms, as I understand them, posit a direct but invisible causal connection between two events which have no direct connection – for example, “Cold weather gives people rhinoviruses”, “Blowing on the dice makes your throw luckier”, “Crossing a black cat invites disaster”, “Brain Training games make you perceptive”, and indeed “God said let there be light, and there was light”.

Depending on the person, they may or may not cobble together some vague explanation for the supposed connection – “Willpower changes the universe”, “cold weather weakens the immune system”, “scientists don’t know everything” etc. But there’s no reason why a half-baked explanation should be essential, and many manage without one.

So what’s the difference between a fetish and a superstition?