Psychics and cops
- Thread starter broberfett
- Start date
Thespeckledkiwi
Vice Admiral
Why is Nostradmus so popular??? I really have to question that.
Show me a psychic and I'll show you a liar, a fraud or a crazy person.
You always are shown the one person who gets something right while the other 1000s of times where they are wrong are brushed under the rug.
You always are shown the one person who gets something right while the other 1000s of times where they are wrong are brushed under the rug.
Each year certain psychic list the events that they are going to occur in the following year. Most of the predictions are vague, others are just educated guesses. Very few, if any, predict highly unlikely or very strange events that sometimes occur and yet these odd events are the ones that should be the most likely to seen by psychics.
For example, lets pretend that a psychic said in late 1993
Psychic#1 says - I predict two famous people will marry each other in the middle of next year (this would fall into the vague area)
Psychic #2 says - I predict Lisa Maree Presley will marry next year (this is more of an educated guess)
Psychic #3 says - I predict lisa Maree Presley will marry Michael Jackson in the middle of next year.
Most people were totally surprised by the Presley-Jackson marriage and as far as I know not a single psychic predicted it.
or another example
Psychic 1 says - I predict a famous person will be killed while filming in water next year
Psychic two says - I think Steve Irwin will be killed by a wild animal next year
Psychic 3 says - I predict Steve Irwin will be killed by a stingray next year
I bet no-one made the prediction no 3 back in 2005.
For example, lets pretend that a psychic said in late 1993
Psychic#1 says - I predict two famous people will marry each other in the middle of next year (this would fall into the vague area)
Psychic #2 says - I predict Lisa Maree Presley will marry next year (this is more of an educated guess)
Psychic #3 says - I predict lisa Maree Presley will marry Michael Jackson in the middle of next year.
Most people were totally surprised by the Presley-Jackson marriage and as far as I know not a single psychic predicted it.
or another example
Psychic 1 says - I predict a famous person will be killed while filming in water next year
Psychic two says - I think Steve Irwin will be killed by a wild animal next year
Psychic 3 says - I predict Steve Irwin will be killed by a stingray next year
I bet no-one made the prediction no 3 back in 2005.
I also think there is more than one type of psychic.
Firstly there are those who are liars and know they are. These are the sort of people who do cold readings.
Then there are the psychics that make educated guesses. In the group there might be people who know they have no powers as well as people who believe they do. Whatever the case is their predictions tend to be unsurprising.
Then there are the coincidence psychics i.e people who make quite accurate predictions often based on a dream or a feeling. For example just before Christmas 1976 I had a terrible nightmare about being on a train and being crushed by a road falling on me. Less rhan a month later the Granville Train Disaster occured in Sydney and it had several details similar to my dream. However through my life I have had thousands of dreams/nighmares that didn't come true. It is only random chance that one of my dreams finally coincided with real event.
If you can show me evidence of a 'psychic' does doesn't fit into one of these categories I would be happy to look at your evidence.
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I think it would be interesting if there were real psychics..but I do not believe they exist.
As long as you apply the ABC of investigation, no source is inherently good or inherently bad.
Assume nothing
Believe nobody
Corroborate everything (/'challenge' everything in some schools of thought)
The trouble is, corroborating the claims can take up valuable time and resources.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/new...inquiry-after-bogus-tip-off-from-mystics.html
You could replace 'mystics' with a dozen other options in that title and get something that happens all the time. Corroborating 'tip offs' and other such intel is a big drain on resources, true. But the other option is to ignore intelligence because of its source, and it is that kind of prejudiced approach which leads to investigations failing or drawing false conclusions.
The bad thing is that after hearing that I can actually see people saying to you "oh my god you are totally psychic won't you read my tea leaves?" People are weird.
I remember reading somewhere that police are obligated by law to follow up on all leads so they are forced to take so-called psychics seriously.
No, I don't think so.
That's not the case here, I doubt it is in the US - high profile investigations generate thousands of dead end leads, it would be physically impossible to follow up on all of them.
Because he wrote stuff that is so vague (even leaving aside the language translation issue) that conspiracy theorists can interpret it to mean just about anything they want.
Psychics couldn't be more full of shit if they were made of steel and buried in my backyard.
They have no place in police investigations.
They have no place in police investigations.
Based on what I know through people who know "psychics," yeah they're frauds if they do things like this.
A valid point. But consider this.
Imagine you are a police officer investigating a crime. Imagine someone comes forward offering information about that crime. Checking through records you find that he has offered such 'help' in literally hundreds of previous investigations. In each and every one of those, the information he has given has proven to be totally worthless. It has not helped in any way whatsoever, and in many cases has actually mislead and hampered the investigation.
The question is, do you take his information seriously now, when there is nothing to distinguish it from any of his previous attempts to help?
I'll try
Ah but that is a different scenario - then you have specific intelligence that that person's information is unreliable - in fact this sort of record is kept and used regularly. If Mr. X has consistently given false information, his info will be given much lower priority than that of Mr. Y who is nearly always right. But that's different than dismissing information because it comes from a particular group, solely because of that group. I should perhaps have made that more clear, I realise I was too general in my use of the word 'source'. It is OK to treat a specific person as unreliable because they have proven so in the past - in fact, you would be stupid not to. But you can't generalise that to types of source. One drug dealer, say, might give you useless information, but if I generalise that drug dealers are unreliable, I may well overlook information from another that was vital.
Psychics, on the other hand, *are* frauds, so I think they can be generalized quite handily.
