You seem to have completely missed my point. If it took these people years to gain the simple insight ‘I don’t have psychic powers at all’, why would they have more insight than skeptics who have known that from the beginning?
Maybe ‘insight’ is the wrong term? Someone who has ‘been there’ often has a better idea of what it is like than someone who hasn’t - look at former cult members or people who have stopped believing in god.
I have never believed in god and I’m pretty sure I know why people do and the mechanisms of belief. But someone who has been a believer, then came to stop believing probably has more of an idea about why it happened, what was attractive about it and so on.
Well, I hope it wasn’t Cheney. If I predict he’ll have a heart attack and die there’s always a 50% chance I was right. :rolleyes:
I tend to think MelCthefirst is correct. I believe she is referring to a specific form of insight, ie insight into how one can delude oneself into thinking that one has psychic talents even though this is not actually the case. Someone who has never experienced this kind of sustained self-delusion will have less insight into how it can come about, and how it might be sustained by a variety of factors before the wheels finally come off the wagon.
She is also right to guess that such accounts are rare (see my previous posts on this thread). The only good one I know of is in Susan Blackmore’s book, ‘Adventures of a parapsychologist’.