Superstition or Faith? China Closes Hundreds of Centers and Confiscates Property Under Marxist Test A Liaoning court has sentenced eight people linked to Create Abundance to seven to nine months in prison under Criminal Law Article 300 for “using superstition to undermine the implementation of law.” The Xinmin Municipal People’s Court tried the defendants on January 9, 2025; none appealed. Authorities cast the group, founded by Zhang Xinyue, as a criminal organization promoting “cosmic energy” and “spiritual healing.” ChinaAid warns that treating theism and spiritual teaching as criminal evidence under Marxist standards endangers every independent community of conscience. Demand fair trials and an end to belief-based prosecutions—share this report and urge governments to press China for independent review of the seizures. Read Now #ReligiousFreedom# #ChinaPersecution# #Article300# #CreateAbundance# #FreedomOfBelief#

The superstition that witches favoured brooms as their mode of transport was popularised at the time of the Lancashire Witch Trials. Older sources tell of them travelling by pitchforks, pig troughs, plant stems. art: Jakub Rozalski #witchwednesday#

When the superstition you grew up with comes through … Listen to the message .. it matters But wait for the sneeze 🤧 Who knows this one? Who also agrees with the message

Do you believe jinns are real? A mallam once told me about a woman who reportedly lived with severe mental illness for over eight years and was brought for a ruqyah session (Islamic spiritual healing). During the session, the jinn allegedly revealed why it entered her body. She had poured boiling water outside, unaware that a jinn and his newborn children were passing through. The water allegedly killed the children. The jinn claimed it entered her body out of revenge. You may call it superstition. You may call it impossible. But there’s a reason many Muslims are taught not to pour hot water outside without first saying Bismillah or allowing it to cool. You don't know what you might be pouring it on.

In college I started noticing something weird: the more people I met, the more their zodiac signs... checked out. I've been hooked ever since. Now whenever I meet someone new — friend or lover — I study their sign first. Their triggers, their soft spots, what makes them feel loved. Not superstition. Just me trying to love people better.

Harness Engineering Anti-Patterns AP10. The Unobservable Black Box 🎯 Point Was it the model, the prompt, the tool, the context, or the environment? Nobody can tell. A harness where improvement runs on superstition and intuition is a harness that cannot improve. ❗ Problem Failures can't be attributed to subsystems, so no one knows what to fix. Improvement becomes superstition and guesswork, and the harness's retrospective loop stops turning. Combined with "metric monoculture" — tracking only a single metric — unmeasured qualities silently degrade. 🔍 Mechanism & Symptoms Observability is unglamorous infrastructure work, and agents "mostly work," so this anti-pattern gets deprioritized. But without the ability to attribute failures to subsystems, the retrospective loop can't run and the harness becomes unimprovable. Further, tracking a single metric (e.g., success rate only) creates "metric monoculture" where unmeasured virtues (review time, regression rate, code maintainability) quietly suffer. Symptoms: "why did it fail? no idea" is frequent, improvement efforts default to "tweak the prompt," model vs. harness issues are indistinguishable, and success rate improves while reviewer frustration grows. 📋 Scenarios - An agent fails a task but no one can determine whether it was model reasoning error, insufficient context, a tool bug, or an environment issue. The team repeats "let's make the prompt more detailed" as symptomatic treatment. - Success rate is tracked as the sole metric. It improves to 80%, but no one notices that review time for successful cases has tripled. - A model upgrade shows no performance change. Whether it's a model issue or harness scaffolding constraining performance (AP3) can't be distinguished, and investment decisions become superstition. 🛡 How to Avoid - Trace decisions, tool calls, and context transitions, making them attributable to the 7 subsystems (perception, action, feedback, control, memory, guardrails, interface) - Measure in bundles, not single metrics (success rate, intervention rate, rework rate, regression rate, cost, review time, confidence calibration) - A/B test harness changes with the model held fixed to attribute improvements to the harness - Invest in harness observability as "unglamorous but essential infrastructure" and build it as the foundation for improvement loops #HarnessEngineering# #AIAgent#

Once upon a time, a $2 bill in your pocket was not money. It was an accusation. In early-20th-century America, the note was a walking rumor. Pull one out at a shop counter and you might as well have announced that you bet horses, bought votes, or paid for an hour you would never describe in church. Respectable people did not want the thing. Superstitious people would not keep it intact. So they tore it. The insult started with a nickname. A two was a deuce. And “deuce,” in older English, was also a polite way to say the devil. What the deuce? meant what the devil? Carry a deuce, the folklore went, and you were carrying a scrap of hell in your wallet. The company the bill kept did the rest. At the racetrack, two dollars was the house unit. Churchill Downs made $2 the minimum bet in 1911, and the rest of American racing followed. The $2 window became the people’s window. Winners walked away with stacks of the same green paper they had risked. To a pious neighbor, a fistful of twos did not look like change. It looked like a confession. The same number attached itself to other businesses polite society pretended not to know about. Two dollars was widely rumored to be the going rate at a cheap brothel. Ward bosses, in the era when votes werr the best you could buy by the head, were said to slip a man a deuce on election day and send him to the polls. True in every county? Unlikely. Sticky enough to stain the denomination? Completely. A $2 bill in a wallet could be read as evidence you had gambled, sold your franchise, or come from the wrong side of town. So Americans invented a folk vaccine. When a deuce landed in your hand, you tore off a corner. The next owner tore another. Then another. Four tears and the jinx was spent—the devil let out through the holes. Banks of the 1920s complained that half the twos they took in arrived already mutilated, greasy, and stuck together, “a very hobo of a bill,” as the New York Times put it in 1923. Tellers could not push them back across the window. Customers would hit the ceiling. The only reliable exits were factory payrolls and the Treasury’s furnace. Torn corners turned legal tender into scrap. The note never recovered its dignity in ordinary commerce. Cash registers had no slot for it. Clerks confused it with a one and shortchanged themselves. The government printed fewer of them. Scarcity, which once made the bill look shady, eventually made it look special. That is the quiet joke of the $2 bill. The same scrap of paper Americans once ripped to keep the devil out is now tucked behind a driver’s license as a charm. Finding one in change feels like stumbling onto a secret. People hoard them, tip with them, press them into a grandchild’s birthday card. The curse inverted. Rarity did what superstition never could: it made the deuce lucky. The corners, mostly, stay on.

That sinking feeling in your stomach? It might be your future self trying to warn you. Scientists now believe your consciousness isn't trapped in the present moment. It can leap forward. Backward. Bend around time itself. And those random "gut feelings" you brush off? They could be memories leaking back from a version of you that hasn't happened yet. Cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge has spent years wiring people up to monitors and measuring something that shouldn't exist, your body reacting to events seconds before they actually occur. Subjects sit calmly. A computer randomly flashes images, some peaceful sunrises, some violent car crashes. The wild part? Their brains spike with stress before the disturbing image ever appears on screen. No way to predict it. No pattern to follow. Yet the body knows. Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, ran the original version of this experiment back in the mid-1990s at the University of Nevada. His results have been replicated roughly three dozen times since. Even the CIA got curious. In 1995, the agency declassified its own precognition research after independent statisticians reviewed the data and called it statistically reliable. So how does this even work? Radin and Mossbridge point to quantum entanglement, the strange phenomenon Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance." Particles stay linked across vast distances, and possibly across time itself. Their theory? Your brain might be entangled with its own future state. What feels like instinct is actually a signal bouncing backward through the timeline. "In quantum mechanics, time may not even be part of our physical reality," Radin explains. It exists, but not the neat, linear way humans experience it. Mossbridge puts it plainly. Precognition isn't hard to understand. It's just hard to believe, especially for people who've never felt it themselves. The resistance, she says, isn't really about science. It's about fear. Fear that reality doesn't play by the rules we were taught. Your gut isn't superstition. It might be the only part of you already living tomorrow. Source: Popular Mechanics