Comments on A "Phony" Psychic

Dan Savage, in a very short time you will write something about every child needs two parents, a mother and father, but your example of behaviour will not fit the headline... I'm losing the connection, that's all for now.

'And if the Seattle Times is going to qualify “psychic” with “phony,” shouldn’t they qualify “victim” with “idiot”?'

Yes.

Dan, you really just have to fucking wonder what goes on in the minds of those Seattle Times editors. I expect to read about an "almost pregnant" woman in an upcoming issue.

And I noted the following:

"She was lonely and desperate for advice."

I dare guess that many of the writers to your advice column could be similarly described. I find it laudatory that you dispense your candid insights for free.

Although I like to think that if a 23-year old Ashton Kutcher lookalike were to write in, asking if the pictures of his huge cock were good enough to put on Manhunt, you'd ask him to fly to Seattle so you could pray over it. Maybe?

Gullible. So many are sucked into scams to get there money, like buying useless crap from televangelists or how about buying self help books written by authors that say they have channeled Jesus or some other made up spiritual healer.

Superstition (and its big brother, organized religion) are set up to prey on people who are looking for a way out of their (perceived or real) problems. You know that statue, that statue of Baby Jesus, in the window of the 99-cent store.

Herr Arschbomber, don't forget all the Heil Hitler kitties in Asian restaurants and stores...

Gullibility is a human trait we all share, and con artists prey just as readily on the jeering skeptic. The psychic won't get you but the tax-avoidance scheme might. We are all vulnerable, and none of us so much as those who are sure they aren't.

And there's nothing so repellent as sneering at the squalid ways of the lower orders. I'd like to see you in the reverse circumstance, trying to navigate the pitfalls of China without your money and career connections to fall back on. The woman is not an idiot, she's a victim of a scam.

Besides, you missed the real atrocity in the morning papers: the giant headline above the fold on the front of the P-I: "YOU READY 'FRO SOME FOOTBALL?".

Jesus, that's a nasty thing to see, on so many levels. How many retired copyeditors are spinning on their barstools this morning?

My favorite quote this week was SPD spokesperson Mark Jameson (such a hottie, btw!) talking about the teen shooting on Queen Anne Thursday night.
He said the 17 year old male victim who was shot in the head is "currently dead".

Currently?

As in, "but in a few more days that status may change" ??

Well, necromancers can conjure the dead, right? Maybe they plan on hiring a necromancer!

When I read this post, I experienced the same visceral revulsion I used to get from reading the letters to the editor from Jesus freaks in the local newspaper of my Texas hometown. You know, those jerks who are so smug and confident in their wholesale dismissal of objective reality?

With all due respect, I think your assumption that 'psychic' equals 'phony' is rooted in the reactionary post-Christian, Richard Dawkinsian positivism that seems obligatory for liberals these days but isn't necessarily mirrored by all or even most respected minds within the fields of contemporary astrophysics and neuroscience. (The work of guys like Paul Davies, Dean Radin, and Victor Mansfield jumps immediately to mind, however examples can be found all over the mainstream.) It's all very complicated and mathy for my poor little girl brain, but as I understand it, the linear experience of "time," as we perceive it, is more a function of the way our brains are wired than a condition of reality, which contains just as much information about the future movements of objects as it does about their past and present locations. Our senses and their respective neurological circuits usually do a fairly good job of filtering out all that extra information in any given moment, however sometimes glimpses leak through. These account for most of our experiences of 'psychic phenomena' and we are only now at a point where we have the tools and capabilities to subject these anomalies to rigorous inquiry. Three cheers for science!

This is a very generalized explanation, to be sure, but I hope it at least illustrates my point: your knee-jerk equation of 'phony' with 'psychic' is both naive and anti-scientific. For science to work at all, we must be open to whatever information we might uncover and not dismiss entire fields of potential study as taboo due to our culturally conditioned biases.

That said, I'm sure this particular psychic is full of horseshit, as would be true of just about anyone who charges a hundred bucks an hour to tell gullible assholes what they want to hear. But Dan: I have a great deal of respect for you and what you do, and you're better than the flat-earth naiveté you express in this post.

I don't think all psychics are phonies because I've seen America's Psychic Challenge, which is like reality TV to the penultimate by the way, and anyway, one of the contestants runs to a little boy hiding in acres of desert in less than two minutes. It was impressive, as I've been trying to tell you.

Um, the "I saw it on a reality TV Show, so it must be true!" defense.

I've never been sure about the paranormal because I've never had the chance to put it to the test. But if whatever @1 is correct in his amazing prediction, that would be good enough to make me a believer.

Currently there is absolutely no scientific evidence that any 'non-phony' psychics exist. I'm sure every believer in the paranormal is immediately going to shout out about this 'test' or that 'test' but I have yet to hear about any double-blinded, properly laid out, well documented study, the results of which were upheld after being submitted to a peer reviewed journal. None.

Why?

I think they're chicken.

@15, there are actually entire peer-reviewed scientific journals devoted to empirical studies of the paranormal, like this one.

Obviously, it's fine if you want to dismiss the possibility of encountering information that doesn't fit into your completely pedestrian worldview. It's just that this is precisely what makes someone a fundamentalist.

I think your assumption that 'psychic' equals 'phony' is rooted in the reactionary post-Christian, Richard Dawkinsian positivism that seems obligatory for liberals these days but isn't necessarily mirrored by all or even most respected minds within the fields of contemporary astrophysics and neuroscience.

Um, no. It's rooted in the failure, time and time again, of alleged psychics to demonstrate reproducible experimental results supporting their claims in scientific experiments. Skepticism about the existence of psychic powers is entirely justified in light of this; the burden of proof lies on those who would claim that psychic powers exist.

Yeah, it's not that they haven't been proven right; it's that they've been proven wrong so many times and in so many ways, usually involving fraud (though there's plenty of self-delusion going around too). I honestly don't understand how a thinking person could believe in psychic phenomena; it's less likely to be true than the weirdest corner of Mormonism, for example. James Randi is right.

It's really amazing when you read up on the technique of cold reading. It completely relies on people's goodnaturedness and on their desperation to believe - particularly if there's a dead relative involved.

Did anyone follow Emily's link? Its so absurd I'm thinking Emily had to be putting us on.

so then, are all priest and ministers phony? as an atheist, i believe that they are all misguided, but only some are phony, only some are scam artists. i'm sure nearly all of you who proudly believe that psychics are phonies (and that it makes you brilliant to be dismissive) are certainly able to view other shaman with a little more reality-vision.

@21,

If a minister claimed to be able to speak to God, and get a direct answer back, I'd assume he was either crazy or a phony. It's not just that psychics claim to believe that psychic powers exist, they also claim to possess those powers themselves and promise to deliver whatever information their victims want.

Emily is partly correct but mostly wrong.

One of the current theories of time is that all of time coexists at once. The reason why we don't see all of this is because time is a "direction" beyond the usual 3 dimensions we can perceive, and we are traveling along it, thus producing the "illusion" that time is passing.

However this does not mean that people can sense the future. Science has yet to identify a sensory organ that can "see" into the fourth dimension.

Not to mention, all of science is nothing more than a model (a theory), an attempt to explain and describe visible and not-so-visible phenomena. And it's been changed and revised over the centuries countless times.