Just saw on Judith Regan’s show, tape of an astrologer, before the election, making this prediction:
" the winner will be the loser, and the loser will be the winner, and on Wednesday morning we still won’t know anything about which is which"
Cue eerie “ooooeeeeooo” music!
(I still don’t know where I am on the whole psychic thing. As a general rule, I think most of the time professionals are full of it. But then there are those rare moments when something really spooky and inexplicable happens…)
Thing is, astrologers aren’t psychics. They chart planetary movement and interpret it. Granted, some get it wrong and some get it right, but psychic ability has very little to do with it–it’s more the knowledge of what happens when Saturn opposes Mars and Venus trines your Neptune and Pluto enters your second house.
Sometimes, they really hit it on the nail. A late 19th century astrologer had predicted that there were several planetary aspects that had worried her–and a person born on April 20, 1889 would cause a great deal of suffering in the world–this person was Adolf Hitler. (I heard this story a few years ago, I’m searching for a link to add any detail about it)
Don’t you think this is more of a case of the astrologer avoiding giving a definite answer that may well be proven wrong, so he palms off this google, which is open to interpretation, and by sheer chance he’s hit paydirt?
Also, think of how many other psychics/astrologers gave a definate answer to the Bush or Gore question. Do you even remember those predictions?
Firstly, if Bush does win it, then the psychic will be wrong anyway.
Secondly, there would have been 100’s if not thousands of psychic’s predicting the election outcome. And what happenned? Only one of them maybe gets it right?
That’s hardly anything to go rattling chains in the middle of the night over.
Yep, this is a typical “prediction.” Analyze it closely; it says nothing and provides no testable conclusions or conditions. Spooky? No, merely predictable.
The Russian’s dug up a video from an old psychic program they air. Supposedly, back in 1998, an old woman purported to be a psychic ,predicted “Kursk” would be under water in August '99 or 2000 and that the whole world would weep. No one payed any attention to it because at the time they assumed she was talking about the land-locked city of Kursk. Talk about a shot in the dark…
And as long as everyone conveniently forgets all the boring mundane times they are wrong, it looks pretty impressive. I’m guessing that it’s not hard to make vague enough predictions that no one will remember if they fail to come true, but sound really impressive when they do.
I find it not in the least surprising that anyone might predict that the Kursk would be underwater in 1999 or 2000. Granted she was talking about the city, but she (inadvertantly) was also talking about a submarine!
Along the general “debunking” line…
PBS occasionally airs a show about The Amazing Randi, a magician turned debunker. In one scene, he hands out a folded piece of paper to each student in his class. He then instructs them to read the paragraph on the paper, which he tells them is their horoscope. He then asks them to rate the horoscope’s accuracy on a scale from1 - 10. After polling the audience on the values assigned (most are in the 7-8 range), he askes them to pass the horoscope to the person behind them. When they get set to validate this “new” horoscope, they find that they all were given the SAME horoscope.
Just shows to go ya’ that it’s “natural” to try to fit vague information into an existing mental schema. (It’s one of the two ways we assimilate new information and learn.)
[obscure song lyric]You’re gonna take a walk a walk in the rain and you’re gonna get wet - I predict.
You’re gonna eat a bowl of Chow Mein and be hungry real soon - I predict.
And someone is going to die, but I can’t reveal who.[/obscure song lyric]
