Among the New Year traditions that seem to get bantered about these days are psychic predictions for the upcoming year. Of course, psychics are a bunch of hooey – ever seen a newspaper headline titled “Psychic Wins Lottery, Gives Money to Starving Kids!”? You never will, because psychic & other related paranormal phenomena just don’t work, period.
However, there are all too many faithful followers of psychic woo who want to believe that it works. One of the primary ways in which believers fool themselves is to cherry-pick the predictions & results; in skeptic-speak, we call this “counting the hits and ignoring the misses”. And there are a LOT more misses than hits, folks. In addition, many of these psychics tend to make very vague & ambiguous predictions which can be twisted and interpreted in a number of ways. This creative interpretation of misses or vague predictions after-the-fact as hits is well documented in the history of psychic woo.
As a way of illustrating this, let us take some time to examine a series of predictions made one year ago by a number of famous psychics, shall we?
What the Psychics Are Predicting for 2010
By Stephen Wagner, About.com Guide
THESE ARE THE people who are supposed to be able to tell us the future, right? Okay, so here are 2010 predictions from psychics, astrologers and mentalists from around the U.S. and around the world about the economy, politics, Hollywood – and a few very weird things.
Christopher St John, Psychic
- Another crash in the stock market… maybe a little bit later in the year.
- Increased recording and reporting of sightings of UFOs will place pressure on world governments to admit “the truth” of extra-terrestrial life. …
Another stock market crash? Hmm, let’s see how the ol’ market did this year. According to Yahoo News Finance, it seems like it was a pretty damn good year for the market, specifically the Dow Jones:
Of course, if Mr. St. John wants to call the dip in the market from May to July (which amounted to ~1000 points over the course of two months) a “crash”, I suppose he could do that. But given what the markets went through back in 2008, I think this two-month-long dip could hardly be called a “crash”. I’m going to call this one a miss.
As for the supposed “pressure” put on world governments to release “the truth” of ET-life, I don’t seem to recall any major headlines on that front. In fact, a brief search of Google News using the terms “extra terrestrial life ufo governments” revealed pretty much nothing; well, nothing except for this headline: ‘Cosmic masters’ call for Govt investigation into UFOs
I suppose this is marginally interesting, but the prediction was that world governments (note the plural there) would have these UFO files released and facing pressure. As it is, it seems that this has only occurred in New Zealand, not worldwide as predicted. Not to mention, in the last few years we have seen the release of a number of formerly secret files on supposed UFO sightings by a number of governments, so this sort of “prediction” comes as no big revelation. If this is a psychic hit, it is a really vague & lukewarm one.
Who is our next psychic? Read the rest of this entry »
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