I visited my family over the holidays, and over dinner my sister told us about how "accurate" the psychic she occasionally sees is. At first, I thought she was trolling, since she went to college, and my family is educated.
Her proof was that the psychic told her that she was going to undergo some kind of career change in the next six months to a year, then she did. My sister is in her mid-20s, so I said, "Of course she said that, she is playing the numbers. A career change could be anything from a promotion, to changing jobs, to a reassignment, to moving locations. It's a safe bet that somebody in their 20s will experience career changes every year." At which point, my sister told me I didn't know what I was talking about, because she had been working for the same company for six years, and only left after that. I was aware that she had changed jobs at the company a number of times, but didn't think it was worth pursuing.
She continued though, and told me that a hypnotist had come to her office Christmas party to put on a show, and explained to her that people like me are not susceptible to hypnotism or the paranormal because engineers aren't able to free their energies or spirit or some such tomfoolery. Secretaries and managers are usually the best at freeing themselves. She went on, explaining that the hypnotist "hypnotized" the audience to select the person they would have on-stage, by convincing them to raise both of their arms, then selecting the person that raised their arms under hypnosis the highest, because they are the one with the greatest connection. Of course, she had the greatest connection to the hypnotist, so was called on stage. At that point, all I could do was laugh and exclaim "Seriously?" Our dad just kind of shook his head. Hold your hands up high if you're a sucker.
I can really recommend Iran Rowland's book "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading" to anyone who wishes to arm themselves against psychics and other charlatans.
http://www.thecoldreadingbook.com/
Of course, that dealt with the possible inefficacy of FBI psychological profilers, which is less comfortable to think about than gullible office-workers.
>She continued though, and told me that a hypnotist had come to her office Christmas party to put on a show, and explained to her that people like me are not susceptible to hypnotism or the paranormal because engineers aren't able to free their energies or spirit or some such tomfoolery.
You need to rebut that by explaining to her (with a straight face) that engineers and hackers are not susceptible to hypnotism and the paranormal because we're the only ones naturally immune to NLP [1].
A counterpoint... Perhaps unrelated, but ... erm... perhaps related...
Most of this discussion focuses on whether or not the reading is truthful and not on whether it's helpful. I admit that the helpful bit is really hard to assess and could be dangerous[1], but ...
My wife's father and mother died within a year of each other. She talked to a friend and the friend gushed about a particular 'psychic', blah, blah, blah. My wife talked with the psychic, took lots of notes and reviewed them with me. I had lots of reasons that could explain each of the seemingly inexplicable notes. But my question to my wife was: are you more comfortable with the loss of your parents? She said "Yes" and "Do you think she was telling the truth?" And I said that it doesn't matter; I'm happy that you're more comfortable, so why bother thinking about that question.
So a year later my wife informs me that she made an appointment <<for me>> with the same psychic (WTF?!). Whatever, I'll go with it. Time comes. I get on the phone with the psychic. She's very nice, etc. I don't mention that I'm an atheist, reductionist. The conversation is <<fucking fascinating>>. She talks about my business. She talks about an upcoming venture financing event. Etc. At the end of the hour, I said [somewhat to hear her response] that I didn't believe that she was communing with the spirits, etc, but that the discussion had been immensely valuable and that I would plan to talk with her again. She laughed, said thank you, we exchanged pleasantries and ended the call. And, as I told friends, I was serious. I don't know how she pulled the information from me (and I have bigger things to worry about), but I now have access to someone who can pull incredible information from me and that's fantastic.
So I've stepped away from the whole is-reading-true-or-false question (it's false...) and have focused on is-this-discussion-valuable. In the space of an hour, a woman I've never met was able to engage me in a discussion that touched on deeper professional issues than very close personal friends of 10 years have been able to do in many more hours of discusion.
[1] this way lies confidence tricks... I'm not sure where the line is with psychics, but I'm confident that I could avoid it... I'm less confident that other people could.
> She talks about my business. She talks about an upcoming venture financing event. Etc.
"Hi, Ms. Psychic. I'm Mrs. Dregs, we've talked before; remember, I live in the purple house and have two dogs and called to ask about my parents? … I knew you'd remember! I'd like to set up an appointment for my husband, Mr. Dregs. He's been so busy working on his startup, CoffeeCo; I was hoping you could help guide his way. … No, Feb 17th won't work, he'll be busy preparing for his presentation at Y Combinator then. … Oh, yes, the 12th would work great, I'm so glad you could squeeze him in then, thank you!"
Fair enough, but my wife made the appointment a month or two in advance and the venture financing was 4 months away and I don't think that I'd mentioned the possibility to her (we're a cash-flow shop). But other than missing the point entirely, you were spot on (by which I mean: totally wrong). [<--That Mitchell And Webb Look anyone?].
Also, as my original comment noted, I think psychics are BS. My point was that value may be be extracted from them.
I also don't believe in psychics, but I do think that someone skilled in this kind of intuitive stuff can really help you think about your situation from the outside. I mean, that's what psychotherapists do, and many are very good at it. I think it would be fair to be critical of the style of astrologers as compared to a good therapist, but like you, I think that sometimes the kind of serendipitous input from such a source can be very interesting.
I got the point of your post. I just thought I'd take a tangent to make a possible suggestion as to how the "psychic" extracted the information from you (since you did not indicate that you deduced how it was done). No need for snark.
He's not saying this person found out something about him that he didn't tell her.
He's saying that this person was able to pull things out of him in conversation that other people normally wouldn't, and that he doesn't quite know how. He's also saying that she engaged him in a conversation about it in a way that was useful to him.
I don't see him claiming any kind of mystic powers or anything - just that this person was very good at pulling information out of him through conversation and summarizing it in a beneficial way.
My father also seems to believe in psychics and that kind of stuff, and i always tried to convince him that it was a scam, but he said that surprisingly many things predicted did happen.
Until one day i realized that maybe one important function of psychics is to provide some kind of hope or give more confidence about the future, especially for people who are not passing trough good times, the problem for me is that i am too skeptical and can't fall into that delusion.
Well Hacker News is probably also at least 50% cold reading (I made that number up, but still). It's a constant repetition of what we want to hear. Similar to the Men's Health Magazines that tell us we can get a sixpack stomach within a week.
I mean it is only a matter of time until somebody (maybe a psychic, or a venture capitalists) figures out what we want to hear and feeds it to us. Of course the psychics also had to adapt to modern times.
I think no mention of debunking psychics is complete without a nod to James Randi http://www.randi.org/site/ and of course, Houdini, who debunked countless mystics by explaning their "magical" techniques. Sure, we can all point to Mythbusters and Penn and Teller, but some of those early guys did an amazing job of arming the public.
I believe, in general, no one wants to be stereotyped/labeled/put in a tidy little box but people do want to be noticed.
The Barnum descriptions are extreme in that they juxtapose contrasting personality traits/behavior (shy v. gregarious). However, almost every interesting conversation that I can recall - was about something that the other person wanted to tell other people that was not readily apparent. Related: If you want to make it easier for people to talk to you, stop hiding behind cliches (weather, sports) and talk with conviction on something that you have conviction on (e.g. if you don't like/understand why are football players paid millions - talk about that v. that was a good first down)
Whether being "cold-read" or having an interesting conversation or talking about "Community" or just living their daily experience, people just want to feel like they matter...
> Because a part of the shared human experience—which is basically what the entire show boiled down to—is that we want to leave our mark, so that people know that we'd been here. (I mean, that was the point of all the different shit, like the statue, and hieroglyphs and the empty Dharma barracks. They were all just footprints of the people who had been on the Island before.) And a large part of that, of leaving a footprint, or a mark, is to establish a basic need: To know that we matter.
I find it interesting when reading these Barnum descriptions to think about what it would take for the statement to be false. Once you do that, they lose a lot of the magic. In fact, some come out as downright laughable.
This reminds me of a semi-famous quote attributed to Bob Martin at AT&T: “Don’t include a sentence in documentation if its negation is obviously false”. I use this as a quick way of deciding whether I’m being informative.
I imagine that learning cold reading would help people with mild autism-spectrum disorders connect to others. A lot of casual conversation comes down to figuring out what people want to hear and (authentically and non-deceptively) telling them that.
That's of course the entire point - they're meant to be close to universally true. Yet people get suckered in by them.
When I first heard about it, I wanted to test it out, so I found a phone chatline and went on it, and left some inane greeting message stating I was a psychic and asking people to tell me tree things about themselves and I'd tell them something about them.
No matter what they told me, I'd read out the statement from the Forer "personality analysis" verbatim to them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect), and about half of the people who had sent me messages were amazed (keeping in mind they'd self selected as someone who'd answer someone who claimed to be psychic...), and a few more were a bit skeptical but admitted I'd gotten a lot of it right. A couple insisted I must really be a psychic even after I admitted to what I'd done...
And this was while totally ignoring the free information they'd given me in their original messages.
Only one out of twenty or so "caught" that the statement were close to universally true.
Of course that's a small heavily biased sample with no controls, but it was pretty shocking to me how easily it was.
It would be interesting to see how much improvement you could get if you walked them through some sort of exercise like I described first, to see how much of the effect you could undo.
My experience with doing cold reading on women I meet has been that people get sucked in by the reads that you get correct and tend to forget the wrong ones.
ie. I often tell a girl I've just met that she must be from California. For the demographic of ladies that I am after, about 50% seem to be. Then I ask em "San Francisco?". Often they'll say no. So I go "San Jose?".
At this point, one in two girls just feels blown away convinced that I am some crazy psychic.
Her proof was that the psychic told her that she was going to undergo some kind of career change in the next six months to a year, then she did. My sister is in her mid-20s, so I said, "Of course she said that, she is playing the numbers. A career change could be anything from a promotion, to changing jobs, to a reassignment, to moving locations. It's a safe bet that somebody in their 20s will experience career changes every year." At which point, my sister told me I didn't know what I was talking about, because she had been working for the same company for six years, and only left after that. I was aware that she had changed jobs at the company a number of times, but didn't think it was worth pursuing.
She continued though, and told me that a hypnotist had come to her office Christmas party to put on a show, and explained to her that people like me are not susceptible to hypnotism or the paranormal because engineers aren't able to free their energies or spirit or some such tomfoolery. Secretaries and managers are usually the best at freeing themselves. She went on, explaining that the hypnotist "hypnotized" the audience to select the person they would have on-stage, by convincing them to raise both of their arms, then selecting the person that raised their arms under hypnosis the highest, because they are the one with the greatest connection. Of course, she had the greatest connection to the hypnotist, so was called on stage. At that point, all I could do was laugh and exclaim "Seriously?" Our dad just kind of shook his head. Hold your hands up high if you're a sucker.