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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rackhir" data-source="post: 1784477" data-attributes="member: 149">Being an atheist, I tend to regard psychic powers in much the same light. I don't believe they exist, but know that I can't prove it to the satisfaction of someone who does.I've read enough by James Randi to know that essentially every "claim" of sucessful psychic powers has proven to be BS or a very non-psychic trick, including supposed "Secret" CIA experiments or "Psychic Detectives" helping out with crimes (in many cases the actual detectives have never even heard of the Psychic who supposedly solved the crime). The occasional "scientific" experiments that "proved" someone's ability has eventually been found to be a scam of some sort by the psychic. The problem is that scientists usually deal with the laws of physics and chemistry, which don't cheat or deceive you during the course of an experiment. Which is why the best psychic busters have been people like Houdini or Randi who know the stage magic tricks and principles that the psychics use to con their marks.Penn and Teller in their series "Bul$@#it" also cover the BS that gets peddled for several different types of psychic powers. As far as personal experiences go. I've no doubt that most people who claim to have had some sort of experience are completely sincere and honest about their claim. The problem is that personal experience is untrustworthy and most people have a very poor understanding of the difference between causality and coincidence. We notice things that fit with what we want to happen, while far more plentiful contradictory evidence is ignored, because it doesn't catch our attention. A good example of this is Street Lights turning off. People notice it if a street light turns off as they are going past them. They don't notice the dozens more that don't turn off as they are going past. If this happens a couple of times it's easy to form a belief that "Everytime I go out a street light goes out. OOOHHHHH scarryyy kids! It's happened to me. Another good example is stock picking scams. You take a list of 1000 people. pick a stock tell half of them it's going up and half it's going down. The next day you call up half you were correct for and tell half of them that a different stock will go up and half down. After say two weeks, you have a list of 10 people or so for whom you have sucessfully "predicted" the stock movements for the past two weeks. To the mark, this person has had 100% accuracy, it's just that they are unaware that this accuracy is the result of random chance not any accumen or knowledge of the con artist.</blockquote>

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