Czarcasm
Groovy Groovy Guru
So are you saying that those who claim to have psychic abilities are of a higher moral/ethical fibre than we more mundane folk? BTW, where can I get a definitive list of these "spiritual laws"?
Matt Rouge on Why Skeptics will never accept the existence of psi
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abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Ha. I have my very own example. My 14 yo daughter can play back anything on a variety of instruments after a single hearing. How does she do that? I have no idea. Just gifted in that way, I suppose. She is already formally qualified to be a music teacher, but legally cannot do so until she is 16.
Dr.Sid
Philosopher
Indeed .. I too always had problems with PSI. Damn Americans, you're no imperium, get your units straight. Let's try it ..
Matt Rouge on Why Skeptics will never accept the existence of 6894.76Pa.
Wasn't so hard, was it ..
Matt Rouge on Why Skeptics will never accept the existence of 6894.76Pa.
Wasn't so hard, was it ..
xjx388
Penultimate Amazing
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That argument doesn't really fly though. It's bad karma to use any "gift" for personal gain. Plus, you have to prove that karma is a thing, too. This is the nature of all too many psi-supportive arguments -basically the Holy Grail argument: You can't use psi unless the spiritual and physical conditions are just right.
Of course, this also fails to consider the fact that most people who purport to have powers use it for personal gain . . . mediums, performers, etc.
There are plenty of examples of people who say they hit the big win (even several times) based on paranormal guidance: they dreamed it, voices told them, etc. Why wasn't it bad karma for them to win but it would be bad karma for you?
What you say here is totally unverifiable. I don't doubt your sincerity but, then again, I don't know you. What you have here is basically your beliefs. There is no way to confirm that there is some entity or entities which exercise control over what the spirit world is allowed to do.
Yet, many people claim to be able to access psychic powers. You just did a couple of paragraphs ago. So you are kind of contradicting yourself. You acknowledge that humans will abuse psychic powers (psychic wars) but also that they have psychic powers but aren't able to abuse them because of karmic law.
And if you acknowledge that humans will be able to abuse psychic powers and that they currently have them, then you haven't really rebutted my point: if powers were real, humans would abuse them because that's what we do.
Except of course that female voice who told you lottery numbers so you could buy a computer . . .
xjx388
Penultimate Amazing
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I can listen to just about any piece (more than once, so I'm not THAT good!) and reproduce it pretty spot on, despite the fact that I can't read music or have any formal training. There are people who use their minds in incredible but perfectly normal ways. No idea why it is this way but I'm not positing any weird phenomena to explain it. I don't believe I'm channeling Jimi Hendrix, even though I can play him pretty well. My brain just processes music information really well.
For me, Skepticism is simply not jumping to wild conclusions to explain something I don't quite understand. My default position is: I don't understand this but it probably isn't some paranormal thing.
Axxman300
Philosopher
True story (such as it is):
My grandmother and her two sisters had great intuition, and every August they would travel to the family cabin at Lake Tahoe, and spend the evenings at the casinos for a week to make money for the Christmas holidays. They did this every year from the late 1950s until 1979.
They averaged $3,500 each in take-home winnings.
One aunt was good a Kino, and Roulette, the other was deadly at Black Jack, and my Grandmother won big on the dollar slots. If any of the family pressed them they would tell them they were psychic, and that was the official family line for decades.
Later, after her two sisters had passed away, Grandma spilled the beans. Kino and Roulette are just about playing the percentages, and if you bet wisely you can win as long as you know when to quit. Black Jack?...Well we all know what my other Aunt was doing, and she was also smart enough not to win too big on any single night as to draw attention.
Grandma's secret with the slots?
Stroll through the rows of machines checking the tops of the stools for the warm ones. Warm means someone was just sitting there, and the odds are a little better.
For the record, I have never lost money in Vegas or Tahoe. Never got rich, but always managed to leave town with more money than I arrived with, and paid for lots of fun while I was there.
Telling someone you're psychic shuts them up, and keeps your gambling secrets secret.
Bladesman87
Thinker
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In my experience, physical tells are hugely overrated. Partly because most players are trying to hide them, and mostly because most physical tells are related to nervousness/excitement and people get just as anxious about big hands as big bluffs. It's not that common to find players with reliable physical tells and they are never as reliable as betting patterns and hand history.
See, this is silly to me. If you want to say that it's unethical to make vast sums of wealth off of it then that's one thing, but psychics (if they exist) have to eat. Doctors, for instance, have knowledge and ability that is regularly the difference between life and death and nobody looks down on them for making money off of it. Instead, what many doctors (or a national health service) aim for, is to attempt to provide affordable and widespread service while making a reasonable living for themselves. Doctors operate in the open, sharing research, data, education, and so on.
Fine, if psychics are all left-leaning politically and don't believe in exploiting the masses for huge sums of money, but that doesn't explain why they don't provide the basic openness to validate their field.
True story (such as it is):
My grandmother and her two sisters had great intuition, and every August they would travel to the family cabin at Lake Tahoe, and spend the evenings at the casinos for a week to make money for the Christmas holidays. They did this every year from the late 1950s until 1979.
They averaged $3,500 each in take-home winnings.
One aunt was good a Kino, and Roulette, the other was deadly at Black Jack, and my Grandmother won big on the dollar slots. If any of the family pressed them they would tell them they were psychic, and that was the official family line for decades.
Later, after her two sisters had passed away, Grandma spilled the beans. Kino and Roulette are just about playing the percentages, and if you bet wisely you can win as long as you know when to quit. Black Jack?...Well we all know what my other Aunt was doing, and she was also smart enough not to win too big on any single night as to draw attention.
Grandma's secret with the slots?
Stroll through the rows of machines checking the tops of the stools for the warm ones. Warm means someone was just sitting there, and the odds are a little better.
For the record, I have never lost money in Vegas or Tahoe. Never got rich, but always managed to leave town with more money than I arrived with, and paid for lots of fun while I was there.
Telling someone you're psychic shuts them up, and keeps your gambling secrets secret.
A couple of things here. One is that self-reporting of gambling winnings is notoriously unreliable. The other is that you might just be under-estimating the statistical variance in gambling. When edges are small, running well can happen over thousands of hands or spins. Depending on accuracy, stakes, and time spent gaming, this isn't even that impressive. Actually, what keeps people coming back to casinos is that not everyone is a loser. If there weren't people out there who had tales of how they beat the house then they'd die out soon enough.
Looking for warm seats, as in your example, is mere superstition. The machines pay out a given % over time. That they haven't paid out for a while doesn't make them more likely to pay out next time. That's what is known, unsurprisingly, as the gambler's fallacy.
Dr.Sid
Philosopher
No need for tells .. there is scientific, mathematically proven, reliable way, how to make money on these games. Own the casino.
Unless you're Donald Trump.
Axxman300
Philosopher
And yet it all worked consistently. Card-counting without getting caught is harder today than back then.
For the record, I've never lost money on slots...
EHocking
Penultimate Amazing
Hogwash.
"Psychics" are invariably rip-off artists with no morals and all too ready to gain wealth by deceptively claiming powers.
Examples that disprove your assertion - Sylvia Browne, Uri Geller to name two -
here's another 13.
That may be so, but how do find out what they say? Can two different psychics agree on the laws?
To me it sounds like the "law" that you should not gain on your psychic powers is an invention that conveniently covers why only frauds actually make money on "psychic" powers. If you used your psychic powers to gain money for charity, would that still fall foul of this "law"?
Apparently there are also a "law" that psychic powers will fail if tested. Again, it sounds rather like an invention to avoid getting busted by the test.
Do you know of other spiritual laws?
Whom wrote those laws? How do you know people didn't make up those laws as reasons to explain why they didnt win? You don't know. Whom would have suffered if you were given the 6th ball number? Why would they suffer. Plenty of persons have won large amounts of money playing the lottery. Why is it wrong for folks to use psychic powers to make their lives better. Remember persons with all manner of non psychic abilities use those abilities to better their lives. As someone pointed out this argument you've made to put it politely is special pleading in common parlance it's called whinning excuse making. It's also an appeal to emotion argument which is the poorest way to present your position on this forum.
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Bladesman87
Thinker
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Poker specifically can be profitable for the player too as it's not played against the house. What the house does is take a "rake" either from each hand where the pot exceeds a certain threshold or by charging players a fixed sum per hour played. Although, even for a skilled player, there are some poker games for which it's impossible or impractical for your win rate to exceed the rake.
And yet it all worked consistently. Card-counting without getting caught is harder today than back then.
For the record, I've never lost money on slots...
Well, I suspect your basis for it having worked consistently is less than scientific. Your slots strategy is demonstrably ineffective, so if you're up then thank variance.
Rincewind
Philosopher
And should you trust anyone who can't spell Rogue?
If psi was a real thing and worked consistently like he says then this would already be true. It would already be effectively monetized. People don't have to believe in or understand the mechanism by which a product or service works in order to recognize it as something worth spending money on.
"Put it right up in Jesus!"
From the piece (my highlighting):
"In contrast, I am a psychic with many psychic friends. I’ve given readings and gotten more than a few big hits. I’ve received readings and have witnessed more than a few big hits. To us, it’s nothing unusual, odd, or spooky. We trade psychic advice on virtually a daily basis, in fact. No special setting or mood is required; in fact, I give and receive most readings over Facebook these days. Further, I make no money off of psi at all (I give readings for free on a frequent basis, actually). About half of my psychic friends do charge for readings or other psi abilities, but they do a lot of pro bono as well, and absolutely no one is getting rich from these services. I can also observe that my psychic friends are extremely normal and down-to-earth, and none of them fits the stereotype of the New Age flake (OK, we mostly don’t fit that stereotype!). I can assert without equivocation that I have never heard a friend refer to doing anything psychic in a fraudulent or less than sincere way.
In short, psi works for us consistently and on certain occasions amazingly. What incentive would we have to make it a part of our lives if it didn’t? I’m not naïve: Skeptics could certainly cite a range of potential psychological and sociological causes for such experiences. Those outside of our world are free to observe and judge for themselves. But my point is that psi isn’t just about the extreme and the strange. It can be an ordinary and consistently present part of one’s life."
So he and his friends give readings "frequently" and "on a daily basis", and they experience only "more than a few big hits".
Of course these are vague numbers. A few is typically less than three, but what exactly is "more than a few"?
Also, what is considered "big", or "amazing"?
I am going to suggest that a lot of predictions are being made "frequently" on "a daily basis", and that a few of these are, coincidentally, not entirely wrong. If one's mental preset is "hey this works!", then one is primed to accept a wide variety of coincidences as "big hits". Specific examples of "hits", together with a comprehensive list of all attempts would be required to establish the veracity of this claim.
This low rate of success is apparently viewed by the believers as "works for us consistently". I guess "consistently" in this case is a steady low rate of success probably not different than chance coincidence.
The difficulty is that the believers are not willing to consider the role of chance and coincidence in their lives, but prefer to believe fantasy tales of supernatural intervention and spiritual connectedness. It is exactly the same problem which keeps the religious convinced that prayer works. So I would say the author of the above is perhaps not entirely naive, but rather has a poor understanding of the role of chance and coincidence in his, and his psychic friends' lives.
The fact that half of his friends do in fact charge for readings, and that they consider themselves to have consistent and successful psychic powers, would indicate that whatever "spiritual laws" there may be, they do not preclude turning a profit on ones work. They do not consider themselves to be cheating their clients because they actually believe their readings are of value. So, whats to stop someone from using these powers in a casino?
They could make a lot of money and give it to the charity of their choice.
Such powers could certainly be used in law enforcement, if they gave consistent results.
The fact is that psi does not give consistent results because it is based on chance coincidence, and statistical anomalies, and that is why we will not see it used to the advantage of human kind at any time, let alone within the century.
Of course I would be happy to be proven wrong!
It is the "psi works for us consistently" bit that is the bugaboo. This is trotted out only for the believers or fence-sitters, and it is quietly retreated from when a skeptic points out that anything that works consistently can be tested. And that is before mentioning that the conclusion of consistency implies that testing (or at the very least stringent record keeping) has already been done by the claimant.
"can be tested" doesn't equal "had been tested". It is possible there are people with consistent psychic powers who simply don't want to be tested.