Coltan Scrivner

Yeah.

Or don't hang out with old women who live in the woods.

That's probably a good transition into the supernatural domain.

So almost every culture on Earth at one point or another has had some kind of belief in witches.

Witches are just like the most common bad guy in cultures around the world.

And witches can come in a lot of forms, right?

We have our own sort of modern idea of what a witch is.

But witches can look like all kinds of things.

They don't even necessarily have to be women.

But what does a witch do?

A witch is someone who is a bit of a social outcast who can harm you from a distance without you knowing about it.

Sounds a lot like a virus or bacteria or other kind of infectious disease.

And I think what's happening here, so the domain I call paranormal danger, it has nothing to do with whether you believe in ghosts or even if ghosts are real or aliens or anything like that.

What it has to do with is humans have this unique interest in things that they don't quite understand.

that are dangerous or misfortunate.

And what they tend to do is they tend to ascribe those actions to something with agency.

So if a bad thing happens to me, if I fall sick or my family member falls sick, especially before the scientific revolution, we need an explanation for that.

You can't just be like, well, that's just how it is.

You look for an explanation because that is actually the more adaptive thing to do is to try to find an explanation for an event that is misfortunate to you.

Now, humans have this.