Producing the Paranormal

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
*sigh*

If you look at things on the whole "the best" almost always costs more, no one has ever said that McDonalds produces the best food anyway (so I'm not sure where you're going with that), just that they're the most popular and that is mainly because they're cheap. We can use people as an even more salient example. Free clinics don't have doctors that are as good as an expensive private practice.

Or cars. I can get a crappy car for like $2000 or I can spend a half million and get some ultra-luxury sports car. Or houses. Or horses. Or computers.

So if psychic detectives have any merit we should see high quality among the most costly (if they can save people then their time is valuable and thus they'll be able to charge more, on the other hand if they fail especially often their time is not valuable and they can't charge much). Instead what we see is that psychics are about equally effective no matter how popular they are. Either this means that all people with psychic powers have them at almost exactly the same level or that none of them have psychic powers or that even the best powers are uselessly imprecise.

Originally posted by Mindship
That is interesting.

Ever come across any psychic studies done with yogis, eg, as subjects, or shaolin monks?

Yea especially the telephone telepathy experiment.

Nah not yet, but I think I did read some where that the in the Stargate project people who were good at meditating did better in tests.

There are many guides for reproducing all of the tricks used by "professional" psychics, mediums, and telepaths. It just takes a little time and effort.

Remembering hits (and publicizing them, in the case of commercial psychics) and forgetting misses is also a common practice among the credulous. Any psychic's success in terms of percentages is horrible. They're just skilled at moving past them and glorifying the correct guesses.