This interpretation of the facts is extremely condescending: the researchers attribute the excess mortality to psychological stress brought about by superstitious beliefs. The Chinese and Japanese are cast as primitive superstitious brutes, whose irrational belief system condemns to unneeded death. Comparing this fact to a related non-fact, the failure of AngloUSians to have higher cardiac mortality on the 13th of the month, the researchers cite the coincidence of the Chinese word for the number four having a similar sound to the word for death, which does not hold between the words "death" and "thirteen" in English. Can you say ad hoc?

However, the fact remains that the data supports an alternate interpretation, one which would validate the victims of this research: the 4th of the month is indeed an unlucky day for Chinese and Japanese. Instead of the belief causing the higher incidence of death, as the scientists assume without justification, the higher incidence of death could well justify the belief.

The data gives no grounds for preferring one interpretation over the other. We have a correlation between a belief widespread in a pair of cultures that some particular dates are unlucky, and mortality data that show that members of those groups do indeed die more from certain conditions on those dates. Now, the question is to find a cause for this correlation.

The scientists' answer's starting point, then, is the arrogant, culturalist assumption that the Chinese and Japanese have an inferior belief system, and whatever they may think about their increased mortality on these dates does not merit serious discussion. After all, scientists are the paragons of rationality, and whatever they believe is by definition on the right track; the Chinese and Japanese subjects, by comparison, are immigrant communities, working mostly in food service jobs, and, by golly, they can barely speak English! If they die at a higher rate than people from other cultures in these dates, it must be their fault. Thus the "explanation": "superstition" makes these people feel "stress", and the "stress" kills them, a case of the "Baskerville effect".

The researchers, doubtless embarassed, have to admit that their own culture, which they tacitly accept to be superior as part of the conditions under which our society empowers them to produce such "knowledge", has completely equivalent beliefs (the 13th), but no corresponding increase in deaths. This, however, instead of leading them to abandon their theory about the minorities, produces the aforementioned ad-hoc pseudoscientific explanation that in some unlawful and tenuous manner enlists psychology, cultural anthropology and linguistics.

To any anthropologically sophisticated observer, what's going on here is obvious: the researchers are fumbling to preserve the ideological preconceptions under which they operate. It is simply not culturally admissible for their research to reveal that the Western postenlightenment scientistic outlook only lets them comprehend the world through an elaborate social construction of reality, and does not, as ideology demands, reveal the structure of objective reality itself.

There is, however, a deeper reason why these scientists must reject the Chinese and Japanese interpretation of the facts, that the 4th of the month is an unlucky day for them. Remember, again, that AngloUSian culture has an equivalent belief about the 13th of the month. Yet, no increased mortality is observed for the AngloUSians.

What does this suggest? That while the Chinese and Japanese are correct about their belief about a day being unlucky, the AngloUSians are wrong. This is, of course, a politically dangerous conclusion in a country like the US, with a deeply segregationist culture. As such, the scientific establishment must resist it.

At least not all hope is lost. One response to the research article zeroes in on the labeling of the belief as a "superstition":

Philosophically, if not practically, one can not rule out the possibility that the accumulating experience of these two large nations gave solid reason to this belief. What if indeed some constituting, traumatic events in the history of these nations took place on the fourth of a given calender and the collective memory later perpetuated and reinforced the effect.
-- Izhar Ben-Shlomo, Visiting Researcher at Stanford University

This at least it recognizes the possibility of the Chinese and Japanese at some moment in their history having a good reason to believe that the 4th of the month is special. But it still slightly demeaning: instead of considering the cultures to be fundamentally irrational, it takes them to be in a sense "deeply traumatized," unable to cast away from memory past events which are irrelevant to the future (in the Western conception of it; the idea that the Chinese and Japanese may have different conceptions of temporality evades him), much like some poor chap who almost gets killed in a car accident is irrationally scared of cars for years to come. But still we see the refusal to take the cultures completely seriously.

I urge you all to respect and appreciate other cultures. Traditional wisdom, contrary to modern myth, is real, as I have striven to illustrate with just one example among thousands.