even tho it’s me, I still think it’s funny
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WHAT IN THE FUCK
I’m so very scared right now.
Damn good thing she didn’t predict “You will receive bad news concerning your health from a doctor wearing (insert color)shirt.”
I wouldn’t run Mystic Meg EVER again!
thats pretty badass
People will ask: What’s the harm in reading a horoscope, or get a reading, any belief in the supernatural?
This is why I refuse to see what my horoscope is. False connections. If you read it, even as a joke, sooner or later something will click, and you’ll be thinking “Holy shit! How’d they know that?”. The answer is They didn’t, they can’t; it’s impossible. It has changed your brain though, it’s found a connection and is very reluctant to give it up.
I’m admittedly playing the devils advocate here, but what if it is true? What if they are, in fact, able to discern things that a normal person shouldn’t? Wouldn’t you like to empirically test their abilities? To know the truth? I would.
How can you say it’s impossible without any form of scientific study? Do you not trust the scientific method? Science doesn’t lie. The predictions should either hold up under scientific scrutiny, or be inconclusive, in which case I would simply forget it ever happened.
Of course the caveat is, the only kinds of predictions that can be empirically tested in this manner are those whose details are far more specific than most fortune tellers will will readily provide.
I.E. something as vague as “The man in the blue shirt will do wxyz” has an extremely high statistical chance of occurring with or without prediction, and is therefor worthless for the purposes of empirical analysis…
Dismissing things out of hand as impossible is unscientific, but most cases of people claiming to have supernatural powers, or ESP either can’t be empirically tested as you said, or their asses get owned by James Randi.
Every other claimant of psychic powers has failed scientific testing. As Gouk14u points out, many have been owned by the Amazing Randi. But yeah, during an economic downturn, in a culture where blue shirts are common (I’m wearing one right now), this was sure to get a few hits.
You realize Randi is notorious for cherry picking his data and his applicants for all of his little publicity stunts right?
Citations
www.dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-million-dollar-challenge
michaelprescott.freeservers.com/FlimFlam.htm
www.sheldrake.org/controversies/randi.html
www.sheldrake.org/controversies/randi.html
www.victorzammit.com/skeptics/reward.html
www.rense.com/general50/james.htm
www.skepticalinvestigations.org/controversies/Keen_psychicchallenge.htm
www.rense.com/general32/randi.htm
Lotuseater fails, and fails hard. Applicants to Randi’s challenge AGREE TO THE TERMS BEFOREHAND. Often, they help design the challenge, by stating exactly what it is they can do and under what conditions. They first have to pass a fairly nonrigorous preliminary challenge. If they pass that–and “pass” is a well-defined condition, not subject to interpretation that both parties agree to beforehand–then they are given a more rigorous (ie., opportunities to cheat are eliminated) test.
To date not one person–NOT ONE–has passed the preliminary.
Randi has kept the money not because the test is rigged, but because there’s not such thing as psychic powers.
You lose, lotusdouche. You lose.
My $.02 on the James Randi Challenge:
The contestants may have agreed to the terms beforehand, but that still does not make it a scientifically valid challenge. Many of his requirements go far above and beyond what would normally be accepted as significant statistical evidence by accepted scientific standards.
To be honest, I don’t blame him. 1 million is a lot of mulah. And, as I pointed out before, to really prove psychic abilities would require empirical evidence that is far beyond any possibility of random statistical coincidence.
However the fact that he has so much to loose by someone winning, and the fact that the empirical specifics of the term “statistical significance” has variable meanings depending on context (and in this case is actually defined almost arbitrarily, based on the perceived skills of each contestant) makes the challenge difficult to objectively quantify.
I might have more faith in it if there was no cash prize involved, and the specific statistical and interpretational variables were all laid out, and well defined, long before anyone ever applied.
Then you also have to ask yourself, If you were a real psychic, why would you even participate? You could probably make billions, if not trillions using your psychic ability. No point in drawing undue attention to yourself.
Basically, I think the challenge is little more than a publicity stunt. Real science should not have rewards. Kinda messes with peoples objectivity…
The experiments themselves are designed to be scientific. The psychic believes he/she can really do what they claim, and can do it on command and be right nearly every time. They fail. Having read over some of the preliminary tests, which nobody has ever passed, they are more than fair.
You don’t need to be a “real” psychic to rake it in. They often say that they would be willing to take the test, but then come up with bullshit reasons as to why they never get around to it. Sylvia Browne is richer than god, has her own cult church and couldn’t divine her way out of a wet paper bag. She couldn’t find Randi’s number but she claims to be able to speak to the dead. She knows that what she is doing is fake, just like John Edward or Peter Popoff.
But you are right. It is a stunt meant to demonstrate that these people are scam artists and don’t have the powers that they claim that they do.
man, half those links make no sense what so ever.
if that’s the best that the sooth sayers can come up with, I think Randi can sleep easily.
HAHAHAHAHA! You linked to RENSE? Lotus, wow. Just wow. Beyond being stunned by your continuing intentional ignorance, Howie said all that needed to be said.
I never said i believed in
Rense’s claims or that psychics are even legitimate.Just that Randi is full of shit and is not a reliable source if you want real skeptical analysis of paranormal claims. Randi has backed out of his little publicity stunts multiple times. I
Fracked i will take your claims seriously when you can actually show me that you are capable of thinking in a non-biased manner. So far all you do is use the same cookie cutter arguments i have heard and used myself personally, and when a legitimate or possibly legitimate claim is made you immeadiately resort to ad-hominem instead of providing actual links and evidence to back it up or you intentionalyl take things out of context in order to discredit it. Arguing with you is almost exactly like arguing with a fundementalist christian. Go back to listening to Tool and Blogging.
I personally do not believe in most Psychics claims unless they have demonstrated under controlled lab conditions that they genuinely do posess powers. Uri Geller is one of the more famous ones who i think may have had some legitimate psychic powers. I’m not talking about spoon bending mind you, the spoon bending thing is highly debateable and is a popular subject of debate in the paranormal field. The famous SRI researchers are erroneously referred . Look at the SRI geller analysis and Ganzfeld and Auto-ganzfeld experiments. You probably won’t although. People like you ( See i can play the character assasination game as well) tend to hear abotu something and immeadiately search ” debunking “unicorns/ganzfeld/whatever”
Demonstrate some autonomy in your thinking.
I’m just gonna go ahead and figure that astrology of any kind is bogus. Throughout the millenia, it’s never been shown to be correct. We know the Earth goes around the Sun, in part, because they couldn’t correctly predict eclipses. I do not and will not give credence to such garbage. Being rational does not mean I have to give credence to things that are clearly irrational.
I read my horoscopes the day after and compare them to other websites/newspapers. Sometimes they are right but only because they are so vaguely worded. And Nobody is saying you have to give credence to “irrational things”
I do not buy astrology either. At lesat not for the purposes of telling a person what their future holds, and what they should be doing at any given time of the year. However there is a vast difference between saying “Astrology of any kind is garbage” and saying “None of the people who have claimed to be able to devine my future using astrology have been able to do so with any accuracy.”
From a scientific standpoint, there is some merit to astrology, if interpreted and applied properly. Science has shown that the moons (among other celestial bodies) gravitational pull does have a measurable effect on our brain and body chemistries. These, in turn, do, in fact, affect how we react to things, our mood, how we interpret things, etc.
So I don’t think it is wise to make blanket statements about astrology as a whole. I think you are making the mistake of discrediting an entire discipline based on the fact that the vast majority of the folks who subscribe to it do so incorrectly.
Being rational does not mean you must give credence to anything that is irrational, however it does mean that you must be willing to objectively entertain every possibility, even those that may appear foreign or implausible to you, until you have logically, and preferably empirically, determined the rationality, or lack thereof, of the hypothesis at hand.
For how long? 45 years is how long Astrology had to convince me of anything, and so far…nada. Being rational does mean that sometimes you have to make blanket assumptions based on reality. The affect of the moon and gravity on our minds and bodies has nothing to do w/ Astrology (it would be biology and physics, I guess). Seriously, I can’t spend my time wondering about absolutely everything. I have to prioritize and psychics, Astrology, channels, ghosts and nearly everything ‘supernatural’ is waaaaaaay down on the bottom of my priority list, somewhere below dust motes.
How long? Well, I don’t think there should be a time limit on scientific research. In fact, it shouldn’t have anything to do with time at all.
The length of time it takes of prove something has no real bearing on whether it’s actually true or not. There are many factors that could make a valid hypothesis difficult to empirically prove in a timely fashion. To put a time limit on it is, to me, unscientific.
But I agree, you shouldn’t have to worry about everything. That just doesn’t makes sense. Unless you’re on meth. 🙂 However the fact that you cannot contemplate/study/research everything in depth should not mean you *must* come to a conclusion about it either way. Much less rely on blanket assumptions in order to do so.
To me, it makes more sense to say “I have insufficient information to come to any rational conclusion about this theory.” than to say, “Nobody has yet proven it true, so must be false.” They are two completely different statements, and the latter is a logical fallacy.
The other thing I think you are missing is that everything is connected. We, as humans, do not operate in a vacuum. *Everything* affects us in one way or another, and each of those things, are affected by a million others. Astrology is as much a study of Physics and Biology as it is of the stars.
For example, the gravitational field that both we, and even the moon, experience on this planet is an amalgam of forces generated, albeit to a much, much lesser degree, by other celestial bodies. And while the effects of these forces on us is observable and empirically measurable, we still do not fully understand how and why they affect us the way they do.
Rather than view Astrology in terms of what charlatans have turned it into, it should be viewed the way it is supposed to be. Much like Witchcraft and Alchemy, Astrology started simply as a scientific study of something that people could observe, but nobody understood. In this case, the influence that celestial bodies have on humans.
I realize this is perhaps lower on your totem pole of importance than the sex life of single celled organisms, however it just seems more irrational to me to discount something for lack of evidence than to admit “I don’t know.” and move on.
It seems like people, in general, *have* to have answers, no matter whether they know enough to formulate logical/scientific/rational ones or not…
P.S.
Just out of curiosity, is a Dust Mote like a Moat for Dust Mites? Do they have castles too? And Mites in Shining Carapaces? 😛
You know what’s ironic? A friend read a fortune cookie that stated I will be forced into a career I don’t want or something, and that’s my case.
But then again, it’s the same general “ghost whisperer” bullshit that works 1/10.
Forgot his name, but there was a south park episode about it.
Some guy would start to say a name or something and someone would obviously relate.
you’re fat.
Well, at least you used the correct form of you + are (you are = you’re)
Irony –
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other’s false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony
THIS AIN’T IT!
omg, a coincidence!
I once used Mystic Meg on a Sunday, and she told me my girlfriend would give me a gift on Wednesday. Next day (Monday), she broke up with me.
FML.