Let's analyze a modern fortune teller

Great Debates
1

I said I would stop writing about the N-guy, but I did not say I would stop writing about the Jeanne Dixons and other charlatans.

Skeptics who do research on psychics sometimes videotape the actual conversation with tarot readers and other “seers”. It can be very useful later to figure out how their clients actually participate in fooling themselves.

How often have you heard a person say “I tell you, that psychic told me things about myself and things that were going to happen to me that she (it is usually a woman) could not possibly have known.”

For example?

“Well, she told me that my sister was going to betray me by sleeping with my husband. How could she have known that?”

So, that is how the client remembers it happening a few months later, after she did indeed catch her husband and sister playing hide the pickle. But now, let’s watch the video and hear what this amazing psychic really said.

Psychic: This card stands for trust and love and sometimes betrayal.

(The client fidgets and looks tense. The psychic notices and continues.)

Psychic: Betrayal by someone close to you (It is hard to be betrayed by a stanger. Betrayal involves abuse of trust, so it would have to be somone close to you. But let’s keep watching the tape.)

Client: Like my sister? (Obviously, the client has noticed some chemistry between her husband and her sister. These things don’t just appear out of the blue).

Psychic: Yes, possibly your sister. And I see her with a man. She is betraying you with a man you love. (Could her sister betray her by sleeping with a man she cares nothing about? Obviously it would have to be with someone the client loves.)

Six months later, the client is still amazed at the powers of the psychic. Out of the blue, just like that, the amazing psychic told her that her husband and her sister would beyray her by sleeping together. She remembers it as clearly as if it was yesterday.

The psychic is happy. She puts the fee in her pocket, secure in the knowledge that she has a potential cutomer born every 60 seconds! :smiley:

2

I’m no fan of fortune tellers, but I must point out that all you have debunked with the above is Madame Strawman.

3

Search for “Cold Reading”. It’s exactly what you are describing and what your psychic is doing.

4

“Jeanne Dixons”? Boy that takes me back. She was as cornball as they came. I think she had hundreds of unmet prophecies recorded before even the debunkers stopped caring.
Time to update your hobby.

5

Whilst I agree with your general thrust, and yes, you’re describing cold reading…

… just to play devil’s advocate, I don’t see any particular reason why you, with the benefit of hindsight, should get to declare this ‘obvious’ thing, that may not have been there at all.

OTOH, what you missed (if this were a real case, which I’m not sure it is), is that ‘betrayal’ can mean a whole range of stuff, of which adultery is only one. It could just as easily have been gossip, for example, and the psychic’s prediction would still have appeared to come true. That’s another facet of cold reading - not only let the client feed you the info, but make your prognostications sufficiently vague that they can be interpreted as true against a wide range of possible outcomes.

6

Back in the late fifties or early sixties A friend was a big believer in Jean Dixon,It was Valentines day and I told her I would make a perdiction, I perdicted that it would snow in May maybe around Mother’s Day. I had no idea it would really happen but it did, we had 4 " Of snow. So I told her now that my perdictions have come true, I will never make another one and I can say my perdictions are 100%.If it didn’t happen it would just have been forgotten,but because it accidently happened she would remember. I just took a guess at something and it happened. It was a bigger suprise to me than her!

Monavis

7

But you just did make another prediction (that you’ll never make another prediction) and it’s necessarily false.

8

Psychics are great for entertainment value. You should try to get a Past Lives reading someday. Apparently, I was a professor at Harvard in the early 20th century, a Catholic priest who did last rites on fallen knights during the Crusades (and that’s how I inherited all this bad karma from them…or maybe it was from molesting all those little boys???), a wealthy person of some importance (“someone people go to for advice”) during the Scythian era in Central Asia…and a psychic caveman. No, really. A psychic caveman!

Oh, and I was also the bastard son of black sharecroppers in New Orleans shortly after the Civil War ended…but that was my stepmon’s reading, not mine.

Nobody should ever rely on psychics for guidance, however. (Although, at times, I think they’re not much worse than doctors or shrinks.) My grandmother, who was widowed 25 years ago, spent thousands of dollars on psychics who said that her next husband was “right around the corner.” After 17 years, she finally gave up on them.

9

I haven’t made any other predictions, so I guess I was telling the truth. Wild guesses aren’t the type of predictions I was refering to,Perdictions of what will happen in the future can come true by chance but one doesn’t know it will happen.

Monavis

10

A trick used very often by psychics, besides using vagueness and multi-meaning terms is the open-possibility statement that sounds like a prediction but is not. Magazines regularly print these simple statements and label them “predictions”.

“Queen Elizabeth could have health problems in 2006 if she does not take care of her health and cut back on her busy schedule.” (No shit! It is so RARE for 80-year-old women who work themselves hard to have health problems. You really need a psychic to tell you that.)

“President Bush could find his popularity sinking to new lows if the Iraq War continues to be a quagmire.”

“There could be an earthquake in California late in 2006.”

Jeanne Dixon used to make these comments all the time and so do her modern counterparts.

So let’s play a fun game. I do not for one second claim any psychic or supernatural powers. But on this 29th day or April in 2006, I hereby make the following predictions. You will note that I do not make predictions such as “violence will continue for many months in Iraq” or “the Republicans will lose ground in the mid-terms because of the Bush’s unpopularity” which any observer of the political scene could reasonably predict.

An earthquake will ravish a latin-American country in 2006.

I just plucked that out of the air. It has until December 31, 2006 to come true.

11

Will it be ravished on pay-per-view?
Or will we have to buy the cheesy romance novel version to find out about it?