Your thoughts on fortune tellers: do you go to them and why?

Raze_them_all · 18-04-2011 10:01PM

mystery1 wrote: »

I am a tarot reader for the last 7 yrs or so, I worked for a well renound psychic telephone like for a few months (I can't say the name), and let me tell you I was given a contract to sign which said that I must not upset anyone on the phone. So in some cases, that meant that I could not tell someone the truth if I thought it would upset them e.g. "my boyfriend left me 2 yrs ago and is with another woman, will he come back to me?"... you don't need a fortune teller to realise that relationship is over, yet I could not be direct and tell her "no" incase I upset her... god forbid that she would do something to herself, then I would be to blame because I upset her and I was contracted not to.....

My advice, if you want to see a psychic go see one face-to-face, you will get much more out of it, and because they are working for themselves they can be honest with you.

Of course you refused to sign the contract as you wouldn stoop to misleading people for monetary gain?

mystery1 · 18-04-2011 10:04PM

Up-n-atom! wrote: »

Another friend was telling me how her sister (who is expecting twins) went to a fortune teller a little while ago who basically told her that she wasn't going to end up with 2 babies - who says stuff like that? Do fortune tellers normally tell you the bad stuff as well as the good?

The verdict so far seems fairly positive - I'd be a bit wary that some psychics might prey on vulnerable people, but if a visit can encourage someone who believes to make positive changes in their lives then that's great.

I'm shocked that a fortune teller would say something like that to an expectant mother. I never look at health issues in my cards, and any decent reader would not look either. Fortune telling in my opinion is a bit of fun, or at times is a little bit like counselling helping people with issues in their lives, but its all to do with peoples perception of their daily lives i.e. work, relationships etc.... no fortune teller can replace a trained doctor so they should not even dabble in discussing health issues.

theg81der · 18-04-2011 10:05PM

Use to be sceptical till I went to a girl who repeated verbatim sentances I had said that day to my hubby along with a few extremely private thoughts that I had not said out loud to even my closest friend. The reaction was positive and negative in ways, it did give me what I needed at that time.

If it was some sort of trick I would love to know how she did it, I still wonder to this day.

Blush_01 · 18-04-2011 10:05PM

Beks, how is an addiction to fortune tellers any worse than an addiction to drugs or alcohol, or any other kind of addiction? Just because someone has problems and chooses a crutch doesn't mean that you can blame the crutch.

I don't disagree that there are scam artists out there who prey on vulnerable people - but that applies in every profession.

mystery1 · 18-04-2011 10:08PM

Raze_them_all wrote: »

Of course you refused to sign the contract as you wouldn stoop to misleading people for monetary gain?

Actually I told the truth anyway, I just made sure I delivered it in a very nice way so that I didn't upset someone, I agree completely it would be completely bad karma to take money from someone and lie to them.... my point was really about the other tarot readers as they would all have signed the same contract and I'm sure not all of them think the same as I do

Ickle Magoo · 18-04-2011 10:08PM

Wibbs wrote:

True but IMHO Randi is pretty damn vague about that million quid prize. It's pretty much designed that unless my name is Obi Wan Kenobi and I levitate in front of him then no way can one win. It has a very black and white approach to stuff on the edge of what could one day be science. Quite narrow minded. Personally I'd suspect future events can be influenced and/or predicted. That causality doesn't break down, but is a lot more flexible at the micro level than we think. It doesn't mean I think dead aunty flo is channeling cleopatra to me of a friday evening, but as Einstein said* "the universe is a bit mad Ted"

Well, it started out as $1000 in 1960something, it's just yet to be claimed in 50 years and has grown to a million. I thought the requirements stated on the application form are pretty straightforward...you'd think out of around 1000 applicants confident enough they could show they had paranormal powers and pass a preliminary where the applicant actually designs an objectively testable "test" for themselves, that at least a couple would have been able to show something?

I appreciate there is lots in the world that we've yet to find explanations for but if someone really can chat to someone on the phone and relay messages from their callers nearest and dearest from beyond the grave, at will, then logic would dictate they should be able to do the same with Randi, or any other sceptic for that matter.

Wibbs wrote:

*Al may have not said this, but I think he would have. Indeed if his family are reading, I'm broke, so don't bother suing. You can't take trousers off a bare arse.

:pac:

Raze_them_all · 18-04-2011 10:11PM

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Well, it started out as $1000 in 1960something, it's just yet to be claimed in 50 years and has grown to a million. I thought the requirements stated on the application form are pretty straightforward...you'd think out of around 1000 applicants confident enough they could show they had paranormal powers and pass a preliminary where the applicant actually designs an objectively testable "test" for themselves, that at least a couple would have been able to show something?

I appreciate there is lots in the world that we've yet to find explanations for but if someone really can chat to someone on the phone and relay messages from their callers nearest and dearest from beyond the grave, at will, then logic would dictate they should be able to do the same with Randi, or any other sceptic for that matter.

:pac:

Also we'd only have one religion.....ya know....so how's god....what there isn a jesus?? Turns out the mormons were right??? well I'll be!!

Dudess · 18-04-2011 10:16PM

Wibbs wrote: »

Hate to break it to you B, that's simply not true. Not in this country. I can set up in the morning and say I'm a counselor. No qualifications or training or certification required. Indeed I could name three utter effing charlatans that are currently screwing with people. If folks need one always always always check their credentials and even if they're OK there and are still crap for you, then get another one.

Friend of mine went to a counsellor who had no qualification in it, you mentioned a door-plate - she didn't even have a door-plate, wasn't in the phonebook or googlable, not a member of an official body, didn't offer my friend a receipt. Now the woman did have a qualification and background in social work and was good to talk to, and knew her stuff at a theoretical level (probably read up a lot) but I'd personally prefer to go to a qualified person as they'll have specialised training as well as all the stuff the above woman had. From the sounds of it, the woman would be excellent if she actually trained in psychology.

desertcircus · 18-04-2011 10:21PM

lrushe wrote: »

Really???
He could have guessed at 21 I'd be given a house, that's a pretty big jump, even I couldn't have predicted that. How many people would that situation apply to?
He 'guessed' my current partners first inital, the fact that he would have fair hair but made of point of saying it wouldn't be blond (it's red) and the exact age I'd be when we'd meet, 5 years before it happened.
(

One by one: I don't know the circumstances of the housegifting, but it isn't hard to catch a snippet of statements and put them together. If you mentioned that your family isn't big, and then a few minutes later he says something about deceased grandparents and you look blank, he then knows that you have still-living grandparents with a small pool of people to will stuff to, and throws in the prediction several minutes later so you see it as a clear shot in the dark. Even if you get a few grand instead of a house, it gets remembered as a hit - "after all, I used it as the deposit on this" - so I'm honestly not that surprised.

Your current partner's first initial? Easy. It was one of maybe a dozen or so different claims he probably made about the person. As far as I can tell, he managed to declare that you'd meet someone fair with a specific first letter in their name. First of all, that's not a particularly outrageous guess - a decent idea of common names for men in your age group would be a good start, and basically saying "not a blonde or black-haired man" really doesn't specify a huge amount. Then you get into the fact that he probably made fistfuls of different assertions about what the person would be like, but you only remember the ones that hit because of confirmation bias. Thirdly, and this is where the harm comes in: his hits may well have caused the relationship rather than the other way around. You meet a guy with the wrong initial and the wrong hair colour; it ends; no problem. You meet a guy with the right initial but he's blonde; it ends; no problem. You meet a guy with the right initial and he's a redhead; you look at the relationship differently. Obstacles seem smaller. Happy moments are sweeter for seeming divinely ordained. Things work out well.

As for the age: the difficulty varies, but if he said 23 or 24 in particular it's an absolute doddle. People are far more likely to end up in a Serious Relationship at a certain age - at that age, for example, a lot of people have left college or gotten their first significant promotion in work, and the way they live life changes at the same time.

Last but not least: even if you're unconvinced by what I'm saying, which do you think is more likely - that I'm right, or that people who can see into the future can see only specific letters of people's names, and only see the colours that someone's hair isn't??

desertcircus · 18-04-2011 10:24PM

One last thing: by my count, that's four correct predictions in an entire session. How many predictions did he make overall?

theg81der · 18-04-2011 10:29PM

Desertcircus would be interested in your input given your logical attitude - how can someone repeat verbatim sentances you said to your spouse (in the bath to be specific) when the other person is over 60km away?

beks101 · 18-04-2011 10:39PM

Blush_01 wrote: »

Beks, how is an addiction to fortune tellers any worse than an addiction to drugs or alcohol, or any other kind of addiction? Just because someone has problems and chooses a crutch doesn't mean that you can blame the crutch.

Addiction is addiction, it doesn't matter if it's hard drugs or ripe bananas, if it's impeding your life and you can't get through the day without your fix you're suffering either way.

My point is fortune tellers are such a dangerous can of worms for so many vulnerable people and there appears to be NO regulation of the industry to make it less so. What about policing, price-setting, fishing out the worst offenders (keeping customers on the line for lengthy periods not needed to rack up the charge, 'curses', telling customer not to make a decision without consulting them first etc etc ETC)

I agree there are phonies in every profession but I can't think of any other profession that has the same amount of chancers or mavericks as the psychic business and this isn't strictly an entertainment business either - it's messing with people's lives.

Wibbs wrote: »

Hate to break it to you B, that's simply not true. Not in this country. I can set up in the morning and say I'm a counselor. No qualifications or training or certification required. Indeed I could name three utter effing charlatans that are currently screwing with people. If folks need one always always always check their credentials and even if they're OK there and are still crap for you, then get another one.

Well that's depressing...

desertcircus · 18-04-2011 10:41PM

It depends on the circumstances, the info they've gotten in the course of the session up to that point, and the specificity of the sentence. Nailing "I'll love you forever, no matter what" as the sentence spoken on top of the Eiffel Tower, for example, is a far less impressive hit than "I thought about switching to drops on the fixie for when I hit the velodrome, but they're too awkward to control in traffic" as the sentence said at the point of climax. One of them is fairly predictable given a couple of details; the other is more-or-less impossible without either psychic powers or advanced bugging equipment.

There's also a very important one to remember: your memory of how that session went is virtually guaranteed not to be accurate. The inaccurate stuff has faded, the stuff that was vague has been repurposed to show clear premonition of something that's happened since, and the handful of hits have been elevated to solid gold. There was a study done on this - can't remember the citation - where predictions were recorded on video, the participants were contacted months later and asked for feedback, and the accuracy reported in the predictions was several orders of magnitude higher than what was actually verifiably there. Things like "you were washing, and she said it wasn't your fault" become "the two of you were in the bath, and she brought up the incident of the severely burned porridge, explaining that she should have remembered the microwave was on the fritz". And that last example is flippant for a reason - people go to fortune tellers to hear about sex, love, money, career and dead people. Nobody goes to one to ask Grandad where the remote is. Frauds and delusionals can take a reasonably accurate guess at which you want to hear about based on your gender, age, and clothing.

Imbatman · 18-04-2011 11:08PM

I was extremely dubious about these things as i have always thought it was someone preying on emotionally vunerable people or at best giving a group a laugh,but about 5 months ago my wife and pals hired a lady to do readings in our house and out of 9 people 8 of them said she gave them information others couldnt know,one thought it was a waste of money and wouldnt recommmend it to anyone.Some of the facts she gave were of deceased family members and she named and described them and their mannerisms to a t,others in the group got information about future events which they said have recently come about,but 3 readings stood out for me,one girl who came with her pal and was unknown to us until that night came out after the reading and said she got her family history spot on but a woman kept appearing to this clairvoyant apologising to the girl for cutting in on her time but could she pass a message to her sister,she then named and described an aunt of mine who died 7 months previously and asked would she give a message to another aunt to say stop worrying she was with her brother and sister and also named my aunt and uncle who had died a few years previously,second reading which shocked me was my motherinlaw was told about her son who had died at7 years of age,the clairvoyant described the accident in detail,how he died and what his injuries were,she also gave the childs name and even the colour of the car which knocked him down,my wife got a reading and was told your brother is here and approves of your new friend who had called to our house that morning,she gave the friends name and described her perfectly and the fact my wife hadnt mentioned her pal visiting to anyone left us speechless,oh and my sister came in after her reading and was told your dad asked you get his accordian back,it was taken from the house and he wants it back in the family,my brother had taken it after my dad died without permission and sold it about a year later..now someone explain how a cold reader could give such precise information,i never believed but have decided i am going to get a reading done myself just to make me decide for myself.

theg81der · 18-04-2011 11:11PM

No no I can tell you about inaccuracies in things she said, I don`t have some funny memory of it and I purposely said not one silable to the end. She repeated verbatim sentances I had said relating to how I see myself and my work related expectation and performance.

She also told me something which stopped me leaving my lovely husband for absolutely nothing. Also something extremely specific to my family which she couldn`t have used my last name for as she a) didn`t know it and b) it would not have traced anyway to this person/situation that I was related as we never had the same name.

I just can`t find a logical explanation so am forced to accept that there is something outside the realms of explanation or my understanding.

desertcircus · 18-04-2011 11:35PM

Which is almost certainly not supernatural. People are able to do this while making it clear it's not supernatural; therefore there's no evidence that it's supernatural.

And of course you don't think you have an incorrect memory of it. But you almost certainly do. Memory is a funny thing. Eyewitness identification is almost never enough for a conviction in court because the court knows memory works in strange ways. People sometimes end up with entire false memories that never happened.

theg81der · 18-04-2011 11:48PM

She was inaccurate about several things - for example the children I would have and time period. I have a very good memory, something which has actually been said to me today by 2 people, SHE SAID EXACT SENTANCES, not kinda like or sorta similar VERBATIM, just in case you genuinely don`t understand - that means word for word.

I`ve thought and thought about it and explored all sorts of areas to work out how she did it, I just can`t understand or explain it.

desertcircus · 19-04-2011 12:16AM

Two things:

1. I know what verbatim means, but unless you have a physical recording of the session, you have no way of knowing for sure that it was word for word. I'm not joking when I say memory is subjective. It's incredibly fallible, and a combination of confirmation bias and inaccuracy can lead to a memory being inaccurate. I can't emphasise this enough: without a physical recording, you quite literally cannot be sure that something specific was said. Your brain is actively designed through billions of years to evolution to take certain shortcuts, some of which will result in inaccuracy.

There are people dead certain they had their photo taken with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, despite the fact that Bugs isn't a Disney character. There are people who were jailed on eyewitness identification only to have their convictions overturned when it became clear that the absolute dead certain testimony of utterly unimpeachable witnesses in various cases was hopelessly inaccurate. There was an entire moral panic over suburban Satanism in the US and UK, with people remembering babies being sacrificed and women being raped - none of which actually happened. And every single one of those people - the Disneyland holidaygoers, the eyewitnesses, the former satanists - was as certain of the accuracy of their memory as you are of yours. It doesn't matter how good your memory usually is, either: this is something your brain will actively do worse on, thanks to confirmation bias.

Even if you're right, though, a single correct sentence mixed in with various inaccuracies isn't enough evidence. It's undeniably spooky, but nothing more than a skilled cold reader happening to land a better-than-usual hit. Do you think a real psychic would find it easier to dictate back the records of your speech, or say how many kids you have? One of these questions has an answer hundreds of people know; the other has an answer only two do. If he gets the statement right and the number of kids wrong, he's clearly not using anything supernatural. Supernatural skills would get the right answer to both, for a start, and poor skills would get the easier of the two.

theg81der · 19-04-2011 12:21AM

We will have to agree to disagree. I know the sentances she repeated were not even remotely possible to be a good guess and I know how good my memory is.

Raze_them_all · 19-04-2011 12:28AM

unless you have an idetic memory you can't be positive

lrushe · 19-04-2011 06:10PM

desertcircus wrote: »

One by one: I don't know the circumstances of the housegifting, but it isn't hard to catch a snippet of statements and put them together. If you mentioned that your family isn't big, and then a few minutes later he says something about deceased grandparents and you look blank, he then knows that you have still-living grandparents with a small pool of people to will stuff to, and throws in the prediction several minutes later so you see it as a clear shot in the dark. Even if you get a few grand instead of a house, it gets remembered as a hit - "after all, I used it as the deposit on this" - so I'm honestly not that surprised.

I didn't have a conversation with him other than to say ok when he'd finish a sentence, not ok as in he was right but just to show I understood what he was saying. I'm always very eager not to give anthing away in situations like this so I don't fuel anything that is being said nor will I allow myself to be drawn into a conversation.
Your example above is jumping to a very big conclusion with no participation on my behalf.

desertcircus wrote: »

Your current partner's first initial? Easy. It was one of maybe a dozen or so different claims he probably made about the person. As far as I can tell, he managed to declare that you'd meet someone fair with a specific first letter in their name. First of all, that's not a particularly outrageous guess - a decent idea of common names for men in your age group would be a good start, and basically saying "not a blonde or black-haired man" really doesn't specify a huge amount. Then you get into the fact that he probably made fistfuls of different assertions about what the person would be like, but you only remember the ones that hit because of confirmation bias. Thirdly, and this is where the harm comes in: his hits may well have caused the relationship rather than the other way around. You meet a guy with the wrong initial and the wrong hair colour; it ends; no problem. You meet a guy with the right initial but he's blonde; it ends; no problem. You meet a guy with the right initial and he's a redhead; you look at the relationship differently. Obstacles seem smaller. Happy moments are sweeter for seeming divinely ordained. Things work out well.

Ruling out blonde and dark haired men is ruling out alot of people but I can take your point.
Again I must point out my reading was wrote down so I'm not relying on memory.
Also as I have said I met my boyfriend and we were going out for month before I even knew his hair colour as he shaves his head bald. He is only the second relationship I've had in my life after being burnt by my first. So its not like I was going through men looking at hair or intials to see if they fit the mould.

desertcircus wrote: »

As for the age: the difficulty varies, but if he said 23 or 24 in particular it's an absolute doddle. People are far more likely to end up in a Serious Relationship at a certain age - at that age, for example, a lot of people have left college or gotten their first significant promotion in work, and the way they live life changes at the same time.

He told me 26, I started seeing my boyfriend 3 days before I turned 27.

desertcircus wrote: »

Last but not least: even if you're unconvinced by what I'm saying, which do you think is more likely - that I'm right, or that people who can see into the future can see only specific letters of people's names, and only see the colours that someone's hair isn't??

It's not so much that I am unconvinced it's just that your explanations are as much clutching at straws as some of the not so reputable fortune tellers readings.
Recalling a 'memory' from the future could in theory be as foggy as recalling a memory from the past. How many times have you been talking about someone and you can't recall their name and your like, it starts with 'b', it's on the tip of my tonuge, they have long hair etc., could that not happen to a fortune teller?

desertcircus · 19-04-2011 06:58PM

In fairness: I'm taking a stab in the dark at possible explanations for things I don't know the details of, discussed at a session I didn't attend between two people I don't know. I'm not a professional at this, and I don't have a lot of experience. I'm just someone who finds the subject interesting and read a lot on the techniques involved. I don't have the context specific cues; what you were wearing, your overall demeanour, the shift in your body weight when a certain question was asked.

The standard text on cold reading is about three hundred pages, so there's a limit to what I can do here. There's over a thousand different publicly available tricks he might have used.

Giselle · 19-04-2011 09:44PM

I'm always surprised that people will refuse to consider that an established psychological technique was used effectively to discern things about them.

Yet they're very keen to believe that a total stranger has a hotline to their dead granny, although all granny is interested in saying is something so vague you can pick a dozen scenarios and make them fit.

If given the choice between believing in picking up micro-cues, and talking to the dead or seeing the future in a piece of coloured card, I know what I'm more likely to go for.

Neyite · 20-04-2011 12:41AM

I have never paid for fortune telling, but have a cousin who reads cards for a living. To be polite when she came to stay, I agreed to a reading but would have had no interest in it otherwise. In her own city, she is well known and earns a lot of money from it, so clearly she is good at what she does (whether you believe she can forsee, or just believe that she is very good at picking up on physical signals of the clients)

In my case, nothing that she couldnt have known from elsewhere came up. She does however have a brilliant memory, and almost photographic recall of family events of 30 years ago. When she started channelling my dead Dad it started to get faintly ridiculous. My father was never vague, nor trotted out hippy-like phrases that she was attributing to his dead self. Ever precise and to the point, my father if he was ever able to channel his words through to us was such a doubting-thomas of all this stuff that he would be sure to provide us with irrefutable proof that it was truly him speaking. I believe that she believes that she hears him, and whenever she trots out another 'dad message' we all just :rolleyes:.

I believe that people can self-fulfill the fortune told if they believe in it - for instance, if they say you are going overseas, it plants the thought and so you begin to look up holidays. Similarly, if you are told its a dark haired man in your future, you begin to overlook any fair haired man as not being the ones that are 'for you'. Problems at work? pfft, who doesnt have this?Every office has someone who wrecks your head, or a boss that is a pain, and everyone at times feels underappreciated. If they say a new job oppertunity will occur, naturally you will keep an eye out for the possibilities in the jobs section of the paper. Everyone periodically comes into money - whether its a bet, or a work bonus, or tax back but you remember it because you make a connection between this and what was told to you.

Your thoughts on fortune tellers: do you go to them and why?

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