... "Good" psychics practice their fraud by being very good at reading people (regular reading, not the mystical kind - sussing people out), very good at subtle questioning and and very intuitive. These aren't necessarily bad skills to have when it comes to information gathering.
Perfectly true. However the the issue here is not whether self proclaimed psychics have useful skills, it is whether there is evidence that they have produced useful information.
Consider Sylvia Browne, a psychic who claims regularly to assist the police in various matters, including missing person cases. The magazine
Brill's Content examined ten episodes of
The Montel Williams Show on which she'd appeared in her capacity as a psychic detective (as opposed to her numerous appearances regarding the afterlife, predictions etc.). These appearances saw her deal with thirty five individual cases. In twenty one of these cases her information was so vague as to be unverifiable. In the other fourteen cases her information was of no benefit, according to law enforcement officials and family members.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010124001100/http:/brillscontent.com/2000dec/notebook/psychic.shtml
cultcross, you raise the point, correctly, that just because one member of a group gives useless information, this doesn't mean that you can generalise and say that
all members of that group will give behave the same way. As you say, just because one drug dealer gives useless information doesn't mean they all will.
But what if we flip that on it's head. Suppose, in my example earlier, the person offering the information was a member of a group, and that the
group itself had a history of giving useless, misleading, and time wasting information. Would you still consider following any potential leads?
Contrary to media representations there has
never been a single incident were so called psychic detectives have had a significant beneficial effect on an investigation.
There are two circumstances under which I would consider it valid to use PD's in an investigation.
1) If it was demonstratively provable that psychic powers do actually exist. Even if no PD had ever had a success before, it'd be worth trying with people who had shown under laboratory conditions that they have psychic powers, as they may yet provide insight. Obviously the ABC's of investigation would still apply.
2) If PD's had a proven track record of providing significant and valid information to law enforcement officers. Even if psychic abilities had
not been shown to exist, a successful track record should not be ignored. It may be that they do indeed possess qualities of cold reading and intuition that allow them to deduce facts. But whatever the source of their information, if it is shown to be valid, it should not be ignored. Again, the ABC's apply.
As it stands, however:
1) There is no significant evidence to support the existence of psychic abilities.
2) Psychic detectives have no history of providing significant and valid information.
