Even when ghosts exist, psychics are still useless

Sometimes you find a good dose of skepticism in the oddest places. Take today's Order of the Stick comic. (Spoiler warning if you intend to read it, which is why I'm not copying the image here.)

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Psyched Out

Here you are with the next sample article I came up with:

This week I’m starting off with a puzzle for you. You’re presented with four cards, showing A, D, 4, and 7. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Which card(s) must you turn over in order to determine whether the following statement is false? “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.”

Got your answer? Well, statistically, 80-90% of you are going to be wrong. [Okay, now that this is on my blog, I predict that 80-90% of my regular readers will be right.] Most people will say A and 4, but the correct answer is actually A and 7. Think about it: When is the statement false? Only when a card has a vowel on one side and an odd number on the other. So, to determine whether it’s false, we have to test all cases where it might be, which is just the A and 7. Most people don’t think this way naturally, however. It’s human nature to look for cases that would confirm a given statement, rather than statements which would falsify it. This is known as the Confirmation Bias, and it’s one of the most pervasive flaws in critical thinking.

You see this bias taking hold all over the place, but I’m going to focus on just one case now: the psychic. The success of a psychic hinges almost completely on exploiting the confirmation bias. The typical psychic will make numerous “predictions” throughout his or her career. Most of these will be quite vague, allowing the audience to shoehorn them into events on their own. Once the prediction has been shoehorned to match some specific event, it counts as a “hit” for the psychic. If the prediction can’t easily be shoehorned into anything, it’s forgotten. So the predictions become a series of hits with no memorable misses.

When reading people, the same tactic of vague guesses can often be applied successfully, but this isn’t the sole tool at the psychic’s disposal. Most stage psychics, such as the infamous Sylvia Brown, use a technique known as “cold reading,” which relies on the subject’s inclination to try to sort out vague statements and find more meaning in them than there actually is. A statement that gets no reaction is slowly modified until it does garner a reaction, and as soon as the subject responds positively, the psychic immediately reinforces what the subject has said as if it were the original prediction.

For instance, the psychic may start out by saying s/he’s sensing something about December. If the subject or someone close to them was born in December, they’ll say so and the psychic can immediately reinforce this by saying something like, “Yes, I see that.” If it isn’t a birthday, it could be an anniversary, or even just the holidays that sticks out in the subject’s mind. Even if none of this works out, the psychic can expand it to “…maybe a nearby month, January or November?” Success is inevitable.

Not all psychics are this benign, though. Some, such as John Edwards of Crossing Over fame, have been known to use “hot reading.” Hot reading involves actions such as Googling the names of audience members, or hidden accomplices within the audience who chat people up before the show. It’s a lot more direct and successful than cold reading, but it’s also a lot more obviously fraudulent once it’s exposed.

Now, despite all these arguments against how psychics operate, we should still be open to the possibility that telepathy could indeed exist. The best way to determine this is, of course, a scientific trial. Not surprisingly, many such trials have been performed. Some of them actually claimed to show positive results, but they’ve never held up to scrutiny. The rest showed no evidence of telepathy existing. But surely, if a famous medium such as John Edwards wished to prove himself, he could pass such a test easily, couldn’t he? Yet he (and all other famous psychics) has completely refused to be tested by anyone who wasn’t already a believer in telepathy. How surprising.

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Commercial Skepticism

Getting new people into skepticism is one of the hardest problems we face. Skepticism isn't magical, it doesn't seem to let you in on secret knowledge (though in some cases, we are the very few sane ones), and it doesn't offer miracles. All we really offer is reality, and that isn't enough for many people. So, we need a hook, and here's what I've come up with:

Skepticism will save you money.

Skepticism will prevent you from spending your money on useless products and services. Intrigued yet? Hopefully with this tact, people will be more likely to give it a shot, find that it works, and then start applying it to other things.

(Note to medical skeptics: Yes, I know it can also save your life, but the problem is that woo will also claim to be able to save your life, so we don't come out ahead here in the view of the layman.)

So, I'm going to do a post today on an advertisement I found dumped in the backseat of my mother's car, presumably found plastered to her windshield. Conveniently, it's for a psychic. Here's basically what it looked like (sans graphics, some formatting, and contact information):

PSYCHIC SOLUTIONS
World Renowned Master Psychic
OPEN A DOOR TO THE FUTURE

I will tell you enough of your past to convince you of your future without you speaking a single word. One does not live without problems such as: love, marriage, health, business, etc., yet why endure them when a gifted PSYCHIC can and will help you with WHATEVER THE PROBLEMS MAY BE.

• Ora Analysis
• Aroma Therapy
• Past Life Readings
• Dream Interpretations
• Tarot Cards
• Crystal Readings

You May Have Seen Her
On TV or Read About Her! Now You
Can See a "True" Psychic For Positive Results

[Phone number and pricing cut]
ONE VISIT WILL BE OF IMMENSE VALUE TO YOU!

Normally, I typically go after spelling, grammar, and formatting first. However, this is an advertisement, so note that a lot of my guidelines for formatting don't apply here. Spelling and grammar still do, of course. So, let's get nit-picky!

• "World Renowned" should be "World-Renowned." Multiple-word adjectives should be hyphenated, just like "multiple-word" in this sentence.
• "Ora" is most likely a horrible misspelling of "aura." This one's really amateurish.
• Again, "Past Life" should be "Past-Life."
• For the last block of text, don't switch overall formatting in the middle of a sentence. Particularly in advertisement, where periods aren't always required, people are going to mistake this as being a break between sentences at first glance.
• Keep consistent with your capitalization scheme. You can capitalize every word, or you could do every word except "small" words (articles, conjunctions, and prepositions of 4-letters or less), but don't switch around.
• The viewpoint changes throughout the advertisement. Sometimes it's the psychic talking in first-person, sometimes it's third-person.
  

And now, one formatting quirk that's not so nit-picky: The quotation marks in "Now You Can See A 'True' Psychic For Positive Results!" Here, "True" has quotation marks around it. Is this for emphasis? My formatting rule against this still applies; quotation marks should never be used for emphasis. The problem is that the quotation marks could also imply the word doesn't mean its typical definition, and in the case of "true," that's a big problem. It could be that she isn't a "true psychic" at all, and they're just using this to cover their asses so that they can claim some other bogus definition of "true" when she's challenged.

Now, we go on to three tasks you should always perform when dissecting an advertisement. The first of these is to look for loaded terms. These are terms that carry emotional weight, but may not mean anything in the real world (you can't falsify a claim that uses them). A brief look through the advertisement gets the following:

• "World Renowned" - Makes it sound like she's known all over the world. But could you bring a court case against her with this term? Nope, she could just claim she has a cousin in Italy or whatever, so she's known by someone over there. This term is essentially meaningless.
• "Master" - This generally means one of two things. In trade skills, it means you've taken on apprentices. In other cases, it means you're perfect at your profession. People are going to assume the latter, but again this is unfalsifiable. She could simply claim that being a psychic by nature has uncertainties, so even someone who's mastered the art will sometimes be wrong. She could also claim she was using the first definition, and she has an apprentice.
• "Gifted" - Someone with an ability beyond most other people is called "gifted," but ask yourself this: How many people are there in the world who don't excel in some area enough to be considered "gifted" in it? Very few. It might be quantum physics they're gifted in, or it might be trivia about The Beatles, but claiming you're gifted is almost always safe. In this case, I'm guessing she thinks she's gifted at fraud - though I don't think this is a particularly good attempt at it.
• "You May Have Seen Her On TV or Read About Her!" - Was she on TV as a psychic, or was she on TV because Penn and Teller were debunking her on Bullshit!? Was she in a book about famous psychics, or was she mentioned in The Demon-Haunted World? It makes a difference, but the advert never says.

Now, the second task: Look for cop-outs. These are weakening phrases or disclaimers put in to cover their asses from false-advertisement suits. This ad is pretty clear of them, and the only one is "may have" in "You May Have Seen Her On TV or Read About Her!" This normally means that you might not have seen her simply because you weren't watching or reading the right things. It could also mean, however, that she actually wasn't on TV on in print at any time.

And finally, the third task: Look for what isn't said. Often, advertisements will leave out information that seems like it would be important. That they left it out can be really telling. This case is no exception. Go up and see if you can spot it for yourself.

Found it? The big ingredient that's missing is the name of the psychic. She's world-renowned, we may have seen her on TV or read about her, but you won't tell us who she is!? Now that's suspicious. My guess is that they're doing this as they don't have just one psychic at this agency, so they can get away with multiple people giving readings without the customers knowing, much like the Miss Cleo scam.

Now, there's something else I'd like to point out in this particular advert:

I will tell you enough of your past to convince you of your future without you speaking a single word. One does not live without problems such as: love, marriage, health, business, etc....

Is it just me, or is she completely giving away the scam here? She'll tell you things about your past that happen to everyone on earth, and use this to convince you that she's also right about your future. Also, I doubt that the "without you speaking a single word" part is true. Psychics often engage in Cold Reading to draw information out of their victim subject, and this relies on their responses. But maybe this one is too lame to even do that.

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