Is it Harmful to Believe in the Paranormal?

[Sophistry_and_Illusion]

@BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed

Yes, but how do we know if it’s a reliable indicator of X? In the case you cited it is, but what about people who get gut feelings about something and then it doesn’t play out? Or what about the people who have gut feelings about something unreproduceable, like the example of the tree about to fall on the guy I mentioned. Maybe he would notice that the second time around, maybe he wouldn’t, maybe he only noticed because of a very specific set of variables coincided. I’m just not seeing the claim that all gut feelings can be tested for. Nor am I seeing that unless they can be reproduced, they were unreliable in the first place.

Well, the question of whether they are reliable and the question of whether we ought to rely on them are two separate issues. If they are reliable, but for some reason we can’t demonstrate this, then it’s unwise to invest any more confidence in them than you would into tea leaf reading. Why should we rely on something whose reliability cannot be demonstrated? If you do this, you will end up relying on all sorts of highly dodgy practices.

[Contrapuntal]

@Pixilated

I look at it this way - Have you ever seen the movie Erik the Viking? There is a christian in the movie that believes in God and Heaven, and the Vikings believe in Valhalla and the gods and goddesses of their time. When they travel to the “heavens”, only the christian can see the “christian things” and only the Norse mythology believers can see what they believe and know … So, who’s world is real?

Neither.

[harrypri]

Harmful to believe in the paranormal?

I’m not sure…I’ll ask my psychic and find out for sure…

[lynne-42]

I think the degree of harm of belief in the paranromal depends on what aspect of the vast array of paranormal you are believing in, and what you do with that belief. Let me be specific with one paranormal example.

If you believe someone has psychic powers, then they can gain control over your actions, which can then be used to exploit you. I have done many public fake psychic readings - being quite open about the fact I was using cold reading - to convince people I knew all about them. It is really scary how easy it is, once you have done the work and practiced, to convince people of your psychic powers. There were some I was unable to convince that I was not psychic, even when I explained my methods. The desire to believe, in some people, is unbelievably strong. They told me that I had told them things that no-one could know if they weren’t psychic. Named names, issues diseases and so on.

I never claimed psychic abilities up front, but that detail is lost once we enter the reading. I then debriefed afterwards to ensure sitters understood that I was demonstrating how effective cold reading techniques can be and how easily a good cold reader could be thought to be psychic.

What scared me most was the number of people - let’s be honest - of women who really wanted a private reading and were willing to pay me significantly to give them one, when I had no psychic powers whatsoever. It would have been so easy to get them to come back time and time again, at a nice hourly rate. If they are grieving or lonely, which are common reasons to visit a psychic, you just keep talking about it week after week which keeps all the wounds nicely raw to exploit.

That’s where I believe the harm can be done - if people hand control of their thinking to someone with dubious skills.

Lynne