Coltan Scrivner

And she knew that there was a guinea worm outbreak, so she was boiling her water to kill the parasites, kill the eggs, kill whatever, right?

And she was trying to convince the people she was studying, like, hey, you should boil your water because there's an outbreak of guinea worms.

And they look in the water and they go, I don't see any worms in there.

And she says, well, they're microscopic.

You can't see them.

And they're like, how do you know they're there then?

And she said, because my scientists tell me they are.

Again, some wise practitioner is telling you that something you can't see is causing harm to you.

This woman didn't make it, did she?

She definitely wasn't convincing to them because they would say it's not worms, it's witches.

The witches who were cursing the water because we did this thing.

Yeah.

And so she tried to convince them and she finally did.

She said, look, there really are worms in here.

And they're like, fine, maybe there's worms.

But even if we take the worms out, that won't stop the witches.

Even with diseases, it maps onto our intuitions about there's something small that I can't see or something invisible that I can't see that is affecting me negatively.

If you don't have science, usually you then ascribe that to someone else who's doing it.

Yeah, that's how we ascribe bad environmental things like volcanic eruptions or pandemics or diseases or all kinds of climactic or weather events that are terrible, but also anything misfortunate that just happens to us.

We tend to think another bad person doesn't.