Put up or shut up. Fight some ignorance.
He’s talking about ZPG Zealot. She’s been pretty open about it. She started a whole “ask the psychic” thread. I believe she comes from the Roma/Gypsy culture.
Plus, the quote is misleading, as those who do not respect her rarely give her fortune telling beliefs as a reason.
Furthermore, she claims that she isn’t quite sure whether she has powers or not–just that, if she does, they are not spiritually based. She would more fit stage 2 than stage 3.
For a very interesting watch, look up Derren Brown - Messiah on You Tube. He goes to the US (where is isn’t known) claiming to have genuine psychic abilities and fools just about everyone, including the “professionals”. Right from the beginning he tells the viewers he has no psychic abilities but wants to show that it is possible to fake all of those qualities. It really is incredible to watch…
This is the official link in the UK but not sure if it works outside the UK: - YouTube
Derren’s probably the most impressive TV magician/psychologist I’ve seen my a mile - if you don’t know him you should look into it. He always says that everything he does has an empirical explanation and he has no psychic abilities. Incredible.
Derren had a TV show here in the US, as well, and was always up front and honest that he has no psychic powers. He’s amazing, though, isn’t he?
I think DtC is inferring rather than stating something known from direct admissions. There are probably some rare exceptions but as you say big name psychic cons don’t admit anything. However, if you do some reading about the behaviour of some of them, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion they know they are cons.
I’ve read a couple of long pieces by skeptics who have tried to get close access to Sylvia Browne (there was one on a cruise ship, another at a venue in Las Vegas). She is very careful to avoid confrontation or discussion with people who are skeptical, and even more so when in front of marks. I’m the first to admit there is nothing categorical in anything I’ve read, but the very knowing avoidance behaviour on Browne’s part seems very telling and persuasive to me.
Also, the very fact that younger and less experienced psychics will sometimes participate in Randi or Derren Brown’s tests or experiments (only to fail, of course) while the big names avoid any testing like the plague, suggests they know very well what they cannot do.
Here’s an eloquent and relevant video. It’s from an interview of Orson Welles and explains how psychics do sometimes believe themselves.
yuri geller once started his own gold exploration outfit. dont know if his abilities çover mega-ore bodies with a concentration of only 1.0 gram gold per metric tonne.
Lots of people discover their career is not like it was advertised on the box, and move on. That is not the same thing as I am talking about. The difference is that the compromises psychics must undertake involve active lying. They must tell fibs (which they initially rationalise to themselves) in order to explain away failure, or to fill the gaps when the gift doesn’t work.
This is different from a doctor discovering that the career of his imagination in which everyone gets better is not the career of reality in which the Grim Reaper is only stalled for a time. There, the conflict is between his unrealistic expectations and a mature appreciation of what is doable in the real world. The real world was in principle knowable in advance, had he taken the trouble to investigate. No-one in the medical industry is out there pretending in the real world that doctors fix everyone.
Oh, and thanks Laslo for that video of Wells. Intriguing stuff.
Contrast that with the psychic who discovers that his gift never seems to work without tweaking and who eventually has to confront the reality that it is all bullshit. Different thing.
…and I stuff the edit. Reverse the last two sentences in the above post.
I don’t think it’s as much of a contrast as you think. Psychic advice *is *correct sometimes - not because they’re psychic, but because they base some of it on one-size-fits-most advice and intuition (which is based on reading body language, listening between the lines and all the stuff Darren Brown does so well) and sheer bloody luck. In the real world, it’s doesn’t *never *work, but it works for reasons other than what the psychic ascribes it to. It works just often enough to act as an intermittent reward, and so people persist in their belief.
The ability to give advice is not what’s being discussed. The point is that they will all discover they have no ability to discover or divine information through paranormal means - i.e they have to confront the fact that they don’t have any powers and they have to lie to make money. They are scam artists, pure and simple. They use deception to trick people into giving them money. They perform no service. It’s not like new lawyers and doctors losing their idealism, it’s like people pretending to be doctors and lawyers. Professional psychics are not disillusioned, they are conscious frauds.
Not if they are doing it right. Most of what a good psychic, spiritual advisor, fortune teller, etc. does is listen and help people use their natural ability to think. Some people have to be taught how to use their minds. This is practically true when the solutions are glaringly apparent, but for reasons of bad socialization or wishful thinking they won’t look at them. A good spiritual advisor weighs the affect of a lie on the client’s long term progress versus the immediate safety of a client. If a life is in immediate danger sometimes a compromise with ethics is made. It’s the nature of caring about people.
Helping people work through their problems is a service. It takes time and effort. Why shouldn’t someone be compensated for that?
Not badly written … if you change “spiritual advisor” to “therapist.”
If that’s the service they want to provide, then that’s the service they shoul;d advertise. But it isn’t. They claim to have magic powers. That is a fraud. If the marks didn’t think they had magic powers, they wouldn’t pay for the “advice.”
Well, we don’t always need a public confession to infer state of mind. For instance, when Peter Popoff was busted using a radio to get information that he pretended to have divined psychically, it’s hard to argue this was self-deception rather than intentional and knowing fraud.
Or they wouldn’t believe it. The placebo effect works better the more tamtam you make - a simple white pill is less effective than a powder you see an old chinese guy / white-coated scientist prepare in 15 min. from rare essences.
Thinking a bit more about it, I’d rather have well-intentioned knowing frauds like ZPG Zealot sounds, who have good people skills and common sense and dress up their good advice in cultural context to get it across/ because they belong in that culture; instead of some self-deceived psychic with no connection to the cultural background and lack of common sense. The later will be too busy trying to hear what the spirits / his powers are telling him, and may be lacking in the people’s skills to give as good advice.
With homeopathics, we have found a way to license them so as to get the placebo benefit to those patients who prefer this approach, while still making them trained enough to refer serious cases to other experts. If we could find a way to similarly license those psychics who are not predatory, with giving them basic counseling training to refer serious cases to real therapists, maybe we could cut down on the predators of the Sylvia Browne type.
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