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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 8918058" data-attributes="member: 7035894">I teach a course called Theory of Knowledge. In a class just this week, we watched a Darren Brown video that exposes how cold reading and fortune telling works. In it, he gives a bunch of people detailed descriptions of their personalities based on some random information he had them submit. Then, he asked them to rate his accuracy. Unsurprisingly, almost everyone rated his predictions, again much more detailed than you would believe, as extremely accurate. Many of the subjects thought he had to have psychic powers.Then the rub: all of the people share their personality descriptions, and discover that they all received an identical one. This is, of course, not news; this experiment has been run many times by psychologists and I have run versions of it myself with my students. And it is the bread and butter of a whole lot of charlatans. My point is that this only works because most people are very similar at a fundamental level. In terms of dreams, anxieties, aspirations, relationships, most human beings are much, much more similar than we are different. I think that is especially true when we self-select into like-minded groups...like a forum for folks who love playing Dungeons and Dragons. That is not to say we don't have differences - of course we do. But I think we have a tendency to think those differences are a lot bigger than they actually are.Take this thread. People are taking very different positions on a technical detail about D&D. Partly, I think, because it is stimulating to do so. But we aren't really questioning the broad value of D&D, or even the basic concept of having believable characters for roleplaying purpose, and that skills play a useful role in that. We are just arguing about a detail. We might get passionate about the details, but I bet if any of us met at a convention or whatever we'd be delighted.</blockquote>

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