DP believes some psychics are real, I think he's lost it

[Dpi8]

A discussion about a documentary I watched last night descended into an argument today when chatting over dinner. It was about Derren Brown and how he tests so called psychic mediums in an attempt to prove that it's a load of old rubbish - which I agree with him on.

He got majorly arsey with me when I told him about cold reading and the other techniques they use, such as using vague statements that could apply to most people in the sitters demographic. IE, telling an elderly lady that they have a parent in the spirit world who had a dodgy knee.

I asked him for some examples from which he reached his conclusion that some are genuine but he wasn't forthcoming with anything of any substance, simply mentioning some bloke from the Ghost Adventures series who wanders around buildings 'debunking' certain things for plausible deniabily then making up shite of his own to 'prove' the contact.

This is a hill I'm prepared to die on as I will not accept that such tosh is in any way genuine.

AIBU to say that absolutely all psychics are full of shit?

How many times do you think people across the world have tried to guess three cards in a row?

The odds of any one attempt to correctly name three cards is 140,000/1. But it's therefore not that unusual for someone, somewhere to do it if it's being attempted. I think it's related to ergodicity.

If one person was able to predict three cards in a row consistently, that would be interesting. But doing it once isn't surprising.

Try it again. I bet you can't do it.

Why should there be? The logic of this baffles me.

So your belief in ‘genuine’ psychics is based on the hearsay experience of a friend 25 years ago in another country and the ‘specific’ information about a single instance of smuggling she was given was so arcane it made no sense to her but was only confirmed by a ‘distant family member’? So hearsay resting on hearsay?

You wouldn’t buy a vacuum cleaner based on that kind of ‘evidence’.

I did similar in a casino in vegas. Playing roulette I just knew what colour the ball was going to land on. I started off with $5 and placing $5 bets I managed to get to $225. I even had other people copying off my moves and placing bigger bets based on what I was doing. Some people made a lot of money that night 😂 it all started going wrong when staff started bringing us free cocktails - I started getting tipsy and my $225 turned into $80. My “followers” soon disappeared and I quit there whilst I was still ahead 🤦‍♀️

You wicked girl!😁😁

As long as he’s not hurting this might be one of these cases where it’s nice for people to be allowed their own opinions😜 why don’t you get him Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, for Christmas (then you can read it too). I’m a total sceptic but whoah, she had me wondering.

Beyond Black is a brilliant novel, pitch-black, funny and biting.

For anyone who hasn’t read it, the central character is a medium who does the circuit of grim civic centres and function rooms of the outer fringes of London. For her, the reason the messages she passes on are so incredibly banal (weight loss, lost jewellery, new kitchens) because the audiences are themselves banal and ignorant, fitting in a psychic show between going to the supermarket and watching soaps, and the people who have ‘crossed over’ (Alison, Mantel’s medium, calls it ‘going airside’) are befuddled, don’t understand they’ve died, and think that when no one comes when they cry, ‘it’s just the NHS’. They’re going on about missing buses, their pension books and fry ups, because that’s what they were like when they were alive.

Some of the best bits are the grotesque ‘psychic fayres’ where Alison encounters her colleagues. One does pre-birth memories and Alison, whose prostitute mother tried to self-abort, has a memory of her mother ‘patiently’ fishing for her with a knitting needle.

And the Princess Diana stuff is hilarious and cruel.

Exactly. The number of unprovable things we would have to accept!

We have to believe the poster is telling the truth (not calling you a liar. Just using your post as a example of everything you need to believe to accept an unevidenced story as true)

We have to believe the poster's friend was telling the truth.

We have to believe the poster's friend didn't hear a lot of very general stuff and pick bits out.

We have to believe the person the poster's friend told their story to told the truth.

We have to believe the psychic didn't have the same set of stuff they told everyone, leading to the inevitability that for someone, eventually, it would be true and that person just happened to be the poster's friend.

My mum went to a psychic. One of the things the psychic told her was she saw a woman called (fake name) Betty. Did mum know a Betty? No. Is she sure? Yes. Ask the older members of your family.

So mum did. Nobody in her family.
So she asked my dad's family. Oh yes said my great grandma, that's cousin Veronica (fakename) her first name was Betty. Everyone called her Veronica though.

My mum still tells the tale of this amazing psychic who couldn't possibly have known this thing that my mum didn't know and nobody knew except one older family member.

My take on it? My mum can't remember anything else this psychic said in this hour long session, only the name she couldn't have known. So logically everything else the psychic told her was not true. Otherwise it would be just as memorable. However. My mum remembers it as everything she said was true. She can't remember any of it but she 100% knows it was all true because how could she have known about Betty? She knew that name therefore everything else she said must have been true.

The name was very common a couple of generations back. Everyone would have had a betty in their family tree.

The name wasn't even the name the person went by. If they really had come back why the hell would they give the name nobody knew them by and they never used in life?

My mum remains convinced. 🤷

There's a Betty in my family tree, pretty closely related. And a couple of Elizabeths. Close enough if you want it to be.

I keep thinking of the time slip poster who wouldn't accept that she had significantly changed her story on just two tellings, even though it was literally written down on the thread for comparison. I don't think she did it intentionally, she was doing what humans do when they want to believe something and the plot holes get pointed out. But it was clearly happening, in two telling over a few hours. If she retells this story for 25 years, it's going to become "the walk back was a straight line with no opportunities to turn anywhere, I'd done it every day for weeks and had the map out and the local who helped me was wearing strange clothes and the dry pond scene looked exactly like the wet pond one, there were specific landmarks that would be impossible to duplicate or mistake for each other because they were so distinctive" and so on.

Yea , quite a case of cherry picking .

There's a great podcast on bbc sounds called fake psychic really worth listening too. About how a real psychic in America conned people then felt enormous guilt about it.

She can't remember any of it but she 100% knows it was all true because how could she have known about Betty? She knew that name therefore everything else she said must have been true.

The name was very common a couple of generations back. Everyone would have had a betty in their family tree.

Plus the great thing about that is that it can be stretched to include Beth, Bess, Liz, Lizzie, Eliza, Lisa - and including when it's their second or third name.

A psychic told my sister she'd had quite a long time staying at home and not travelling. Given that this was early 2021, no shit, Sherlock

There used to be a provision in the Vagrancy Act that made fortune telling an offence. It was repealed some years ago. It should be brought back.

I remember that thread, I think — the one where she and her friend and their families were staying on a campsite, and she and her friend walked into town for groceries, and somehow, en route back to the site, managed to miss the entrance and experience the walk as far longer than it should have been? plus something about a dry pond and a frog?

Yes, it was a good example of how easy it is, even with no intention to deceive, to rewrite details to fit your interpretation of an incident.

I’ve posted this on here before, but my (extremely honest) mother talked for decades about the uncanny accuracy of a locally-famous ‘psychic’ she saw with her sister when I was a baby (50 years ago) and used to list all the specific things she said that ‘came true’ — number and sex of children, initials etc. A few years ago, we found my aunt’s notes on the session in an old handbag in the attic, and of course it was the usual mix of guesses, generalisations, cold-reading.

I remember that thread, I think — the one where she and her friend and their families were staying on a campsite, and she and her friend walked into town for groceries, and somehow, en route back to the site, managed to miss the entrance and experience the walk as far longer than it should have been? plus something about a dry pond and a frog?

That's the one. She had a full pond as a landmark and came across a dry one, with a frog nearby. Obviously the frog was a sign of time going topsy-turvy because there was no water nearby, and definitely not a sign that she was in fact quite near water even though she couldn't see it.

As you say, no intention to deceive. But to imagine that time slipping is a more likely explanation than simply making a mistake in a less familiar area!

I used to be involved in the scene and I think a very few people can genuinely do it (not me) but it's very rare.

Also if they do get right answers by psychic or cold reading means, it's from demons anyway.

Tell him everyone should seek guidance only from the Bible/Jesus.

Psychics etc are an abomination to God and will burn, sadly.

What a load of bollocks!

When I said that fortune telling should be outlawed I was really thinking of a fine, or for the worst frauds maybe a short prison sentence.

Burning wasn’t on the agenda.

Why would ‘demons’ need to be involved in cold-reading? It’s a set of techniques used to make the subject think the ‘psychic’ mysteriously knows things about them. It doesn’t require any supernatural intervention whatsoever.

You could have written this about me (apart from the psychic stuff, I’m a none believer.

My DF (now departed) was an alcoholic and I had to be hyper vigilante around him. Facial expressions, the tone of the room, when it was better to go off to your bedroom to stay out of the way, before things actually happened and the arguments started between him and DM. I went through these huge emotions all throughout my childhood and they absolutely have made me hyper aware of changes within people, even subtle changes, where I know they have shifted somewhat in their mannerisms, that they might have something they need to talk to me about.

Even now, when I feel that shift in a person my stomach lurches and I feel uneasy, just how I felt when I was a child.

Derren Brown is the one who really made me a firm nonbeliever.

I agree DH has MH problems and i pick up on his tone from just a word if he is feeling depressed.
I had a friend who told me here friend who was a psychic and picked up that another friend was paranoid about BO but never told anyone until psychic mentioned it, so she must be genuine. To me someone who is paranoid about BO would be constantly checking themselves and it would be really obvious from body language.

Oh for Pete’s sake. Of 416 voters 45% think you’re being unreasonable to say that psychics are full of shit.

I know this isn’t statistically reliable as a survey, but it’s so depressing.

How did centuries of science, logic and the enlightenment not drive out belief in this utter garbage?

Indeed @WhatsTheUseOfWorrying , it's sad that things (be they beliefs, customs, ethics, morals...) don't really progress and improve with further enlightenment and scientific discovery; they merely change.
People always have and always will believe in all sorts of counter-intuitive crap for which there is no proof, nor even any evidence. 🤷‍♀️

You are totally unreasonable he can believe what he wants too. Is this really the hill you want to die on - give over!!