Read this one carefully; and really try to understand this. If more people were aware of this and understood it, then we wouldn’t be so easily fooled and won’t be so unnecessarily impressed by these idiots.
Institutionalized Fraud: How Wall Street Survives on Predicting the Past
“Bull Market – A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius.“ Anon.
Entertainers and charlatans who claim to read minds use a common trick of stating the obvious. “I feel there is someone in the audience thinking about a man named Peter.” Given that Peter is a common name, most likely a few vulnerable souls in the crowd will yell “yes, yes” in rapt amazement. If the seer is unlucky that night with an unusual absence of Peters and nobody answers, he would quickly move on to find the right name in a skilled way that obscures the fishing expedition. “I sense that you’re concerned about money” and there is a yelp of recognition among those who know a Peter (or Paul or whoever was selected). Because money is a common concern, he has a good chance of scoring a hit. If not he can glide to another high-probability stab with talk about a sick loved one. And so on goes the evening until the man with magic powers of mindreading saw that Betty just lost Peter to cancer and is now concerned with saving her house. Amazing! (More here)
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