Well you still can't fix stupid, and superstition has always been an indicator of stupid.

But a little superstition can be fun, after all my own grandmother was a fortune teller herself.

>As a historian who studies medieval magic, I’m fascinated by how a coterie of church and state authorities conspired to develop and promote this new concept of witchcraft for their own purposes.

The rest of us should pay more attention to other ways the church and state authorities still develop and promote other unsuitable concepts to the disadvantage of their subjects.

Authoritarianism can put a disadvantageous twist on just about anything it comes into contact with.

Blindly following authority for conformity's sake tends to perpetuate and amplify an authority's residual unresolved stupidity, which we all have at least a bit of even when it started out to be just a little fun or tradition in some way.

It's difficult enough to pass worthwhile findings of the millennia from one generation to the next, and one reason things should be continuously questioned is to focus on the difference between unsubstantiated superstition and merely outdated or historical concepts as the bulk of mankind's knowledge is stewarded into the future.

There's a lot of needles in that haystack.

The university is supposed to be the meeting place between the bulk of the traditional knowledge being passed on, and many new findings being validated and developed.

Other institutions do this too, sometimes on a larger scale with narrower focus. Some of these are more academically oriented and intersect with academia more than others.

Traditional knowledge should be (re)validated as you go along too.

It takes a lot of questioning to accurately identify the stupid stuff that should no longer be passed on as acceptable.

During those times when questioning is supressed, or development laboratories not available,
it would seem the most risky for human progress to be stalled or reversed.

Some people are anti-progress anyway, for both real and superstitious reasons.

In the painting of the 14th Century lecture hall at the University of Bologna, this does not look like the kind of environment where questions over unvalidatable teachings could be enthusiastically entertained.

Likely somewhat familiar with those who attend university far from Italy half a millennium later.

But at this time isn't this virtually indistinguishable from a religious teaching session where the intention was mastery of texts and concepts intended to never be questioned except under severe penalty?

Today's institutions, universities, and corporations are often still striving to be as legendary in the same traditional way, when they focus on eminence & authoritarianism over skepticism, with each elevation moving an individual one step further beyond doubts which could challenge the eminence hierarchy.

These are the ones more subject to actions or inactions based on unfounded superstition to some extent, and can not be easily corrected from one generation to the next.

And one of the reasons people still say you can't fix stupid.

If you don't constantly scrutinize authorities for harmful superstitions, you could eventually end up with a real witch hunt where some kind of heads do roll in some way.