I have a pet theory (certainly unoriginal) that humans as a species feel a compelling need to indulge in some form of magical thinking in order to cope with existential horror.
A few things are simultaneously true:
1. We have a truly fantastic level of agency as actors in the world. A single human can build a house out of raw materials, write a book series with hundreds of settings and believable characters, start a war, etc.
2. In order to make the most of that agency, we need a psychological system that makes us feel empowered to use it. Having nature's most impressive brain would be pointless if we all believed everything we tried was doomed to fail anyway so we should just sit in the dirt and eat slugs.
3. We are also corporeal objects made of surprisingly fragile meat and bone subject to the careless whims of physics. Through no fault or intention of anyone, all of your agency can be completely taken in an instant. Just be standing in the wrong place when a tree branch snaps off, have one cell misdivide and become cancerous, choke on a grape.
We need 2 in order to make the most of 1. But the more we believe ourselves in control, the more horrific contemplating 3 becomes.
I often wonder if we evolved magical thinking and all of its manifestations like religion, parapsychology, destiny, fate, etc. in order to hold these three realizations in some sort of stable configuration.
“A tendency to superstition is of the very essence of humanity and, when we think we have completely extinguished it, we shall find it retreating into the strangest nooks and corners, that it may issue out thence on the first occasion it can do with safety.”
In addition to the accidental things already listed under 3, there is also the additional points that:
- Other people exist and they also have a lot of agency, the exercise of which sometimes directly interferes with your life. Not to mention how much capacity bigger entities like countries have to mess with your life it they wanted to.
- In opposition to point 1: while humans do have tremendous agency, they also have very little agency when seen against how big the universe really is. There are more stars in the sky than people on Earth, by a considerable margin. Nobody can do anything at all to influence them. Hell, we can't even manipulate the orbit of our own planet in any meaningful way. I think many of the magical thinking paradigms are ways to cope with that as well.
It can be, depending on your thought process while playing. If you're indulging in feeling like your willpower can affect what cards get drawn, then yes. If you're just thinking about betting strategy and your opponents, then less so.
My own magical thinking indulgence is fishing. I'll tell myself dumb stuff like "the next cast will be the one". I think any sort of gambling-like experience where random chance is heavily involved can be an outlet for magical thinking, healthy or otherwise.
My theory is that this all about "I know something you don't know." The people I have met with the most fringe theories don't have much agency in life. I suppose it could be a form of narcissism as well.
Humans make meaning, as far as we have observed we are the meaning making organ of the universe in a totally literalist physicalized sense. Stars convert mass to energy, humans convert energy to semantic meaning with high syntactic complexity, density and causal leverage.
We build the libraries, we deflect the asteroids for the foreseeable future (we really should check and see if dolphins would like thumbs.)
Flight existed before apes but - in a purely non-woo sense - a few of us gave the universe the how and why of it.
We haven't yet definitively ruled out the possibility of altering spacetime topology, or solving entropy, or plucking entities out of the light cone.
Humans tend to bring what they desire into the world. Wheat threshers, combines, tricorders, harry potter cloaks.
Listen to interviews of people who lived from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's. They say the whole damn world changed, everything changed.
Now,
A large contingent of Humans want eternal life, want resurrection.
There is this kind of speculative naturalists pascals wager at play right now that we are losing at.
Where a certain contingent of the population simply refuses to believe that the earth could be destroyed by an asteroid, or if it was it will be part of the fulfillment of their wishes for a new heaven and earth.
But if they have the least doubt in the quite moments of the night they need to realize. That if only what we empirically observe is stable and true, then their only hope for their desires coming true might be humans making it happen. We don't know yet, we just don't know, it's early days yet, nothing or everything might be in the future.
So we really need to preserve humans so they can keep making meaning, make our existence more resilient and keep pushing the edge and expansion of knowledge.
At one point humans thought travel to the moon was impossible, some living people still do, but the very strange implications is that us and other meaning making agents might actually fill the universe with meaning, we might end up giving the universe meaning, as semantically less complex dna bootstrapped us we may bootstrap the whole universe.
I find it highly unlikely but I cannot rule it out and no one else can either. We really need to protect human and the life we can see.
Ironically, scientism is also a manifestation of "magical thinking":
Going through ritualistic motions of scientific appearances without actual understanding, getting positive feedback from the multitudes being just as incompetent.
Here, with the "Telepathy Tapes", the subject matter is immediately categorized as "magic": stuff deemed to be impossible because of it "obviously/implicitly contradicting scientific knowledge".
But that contradiction doesn't really exist?
To give a decidedly clumsy, but entirely "physically possible", explanation of "telepathy": little green men from outer space might facilitate that effect using extremely advanced technology, hiding their presence and foiling attempts at getting easily understood evidence.
While such a scenario is highly inconvenient for current human academia to address, it's not "impossible" in any way?
Isn't it really "magical thinking" to assume, such "outlandish" scenarios were excluded by natural law?
So, to explain one invisible and unprovable thing for which there is zero evidence, you have invented a completely different invisible and unprovable thing for which there is also zero evidence. Great job :)
There are many "invisible" things that exist.
"Telepathy" isn't "unprovable".
The "Telepathy Tapes" are evidence in favor of telepathy (It appears, you confuse "evidence" with "proof").
The explanation I suggested is neither "invisible" nor "unprovable".
There actually is evidence for it as well (again, your idea of evidence is wrong).
In other words, your assessment is entirely counter-factual and simply false.
Noting the absurd down-votes on my comment in conjunction with the lack of comments providing any rational argument is actually evidence in favor of the hypothesis presented there.
But don't you see? My two invisible things with no evidence support each other, giving each other evidence! Hey, what are you doing... put down that razor!
Ritualistic “magical thinking” stays the same regardless of outcomes or new information. Science does the exact opposite - predictive power determines what’s true. Nobody said your alien hypothesis is impossible; just that it’s highly implausible. No predictions, no evidence, no way to test it.
Your assessment of "magical thinking" being impervious to criticism funnily applies just the same to the attitude exhibited here regarding "fringed" ideas like "telepathy".
The "Telepathy Tapes" are "new information", people's attitudes stay the same regardless.
"Predictive power" isn't the source of truth in science, evidence for that attribute is. Given even only a hint of such evidence, scientists are supposed to work in order to acquire more, not to ignore the hint because that work would inconvenience them.
You claim that "alien hypothesis" was implausible, but that statement would require solid arguments in its favor. And those don't exist. You rather argue from ignorance, but absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
Again, your pretense of "no predictions, no evidence, no way to test it" is simply counter-factual. You argue from ignorance. (To reiterate, evidence isn't the same as "proof")
The “Telepathy Tapes” aren’t new information. They repeat a setup already tested under controlled conditions: facilitators know the answers and guide participants through non-telepathic cues, usually without realizing it. When those cues are blocked, the “telepathy” disappears. Scientists did the rational thing, tried to replicate the effect, and it failed.
Absence of evidence isn’t proof of absence, but when every controlled test comes up empty, that’s the result. You might as well call a magician’s card trick new evidence for magic.
You invoke magic when you pretend, those "tests" were somehow "proof" instead of merely evidence against the claim.
Argument from authority is no valid scientific approach, neither is you putting up a straw-man (your claim how the supposed effect came to be). Just because that's how you can imagine how the "trick" might work doesn't mean, it's what's actually happening.
Just because the result (dis-)pleases you doesn't mean, the experiment was done (in-)correctly.
I am not invoking magic. When proper controls are added, the effect disappears. That is probabilistic evidence against the claim, not proof of anything. Just the outcome of repeated tests.
No one is appealing to authority. The experiments are public, the methods transparent, and the results reproducible. If there is a better design, describe it.
Facilitator cueing is not a guess or straw man. It has been directly measured in controlled studies, and when those cues are removed, performance drops to chance. That is what the data shows.
You say tests are not proof, which is true, but repeated failure still counts. You call cueing a straw man, though it has been measured directly. Is there any outcome that would convince you the effect isn’t there? If not then this isn’t a discussion about evidence anymore.
Blocked & Reported (the podcast) did two episodes on this [1] and [2] that breaks down most of the controversy. This has completely ruined me on anything even adjacent to this, like whether Koko the gorilla could actually communicate.
Sure. But often one of the two sides has an obvious agenda.
I thought of James Randi and "spoon bender", Uri Geller. I suppose if you're cynical enough you can presume that both are desperate for airtime, self-promotion and we should therefore be skeptical of both.
Randi though for me has much less to gain in exposing frauds.
Being convinced without the ability to explain the argument is troubling.
But more importantly, mainstream scientists have the "obvious agenda" (well documented by now) to avoid ridicule and mockery. So if you're willing to weaponize ridicule and mockery, you can successfully suppress scientific investigation into whatever areas you choose.
Let's not forget, the CIA invented the very term "conspiracy theory" to suppress investigation into illegal intelligence activities.
I mean, at some point we are convinced as a convenience. You can use mathematical formulations describing _how_ a motor works without understanding why they are true. Similarly, I don't believe that there is a grand conspiracy involving chemtrails, even though I haven't proven that all the theories I've heard are false. I'm just fairly confident that this _could_ be done, given enough time and resources. But practically, I have to get on with my life.
Being lazy incurs costs. With regard to "conspiracies" that cost is explicitly vulnerability to them.
Neither "chemtrails", "UFOs&aliens" nor "telepathy" appear particularly "plausible". But that could just as well be a statement about your method of determining 'plausibility'?
You invoke limited personal resources to justify complacency. Likely, you estimate the costs of being wrong as negligible since you never really thought about possible implications and do not know about any being particularly relevant to you. That's an argument from ignorance.
Ya, I agree, my main point is that arguments from ignorance are acceptable sometimes. My main claim to schiffern is something like "Being convinced without the ability to explain the argument is sometimes fine." As specific examples, I propose chemtrails and how-motors-work. I think it is totally acceptable to dismiss the in-depth explanation for most people, because for most people they just aren't that important.
Are you claiming that you never dismiss anything without fully understanding it? Do you completely understand all of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Baha'i, etc? I think it is possible to generate an infinite list of things you don't fully understand. And yet you of course have to take a practical stance on some of these things for your everyday life.
Catch 22. The best way to avoid hard facts is to scare away scientists. ;)
But I agree, this is just garbage pseudoscience. I listened to the Banned & Reported episode, and TL;DR the Telepathy Tapes experiments had a non-blinded 'facilitator' touching the blindfolded 'psychic.' My mind immediately went to Clever Hans, before the podcast hosts even brought it up later in the episode.
Just watch any Derren Brown video to see how easy it is to 'cue' someone from across the room. This is James Randi 101, folks...
An ideal listen for anyone looking to sharpen their critical thinking. The reasoning moves are subtle, and it’s easy to miss the small leaps and omissions that reveal how persuasive but unsound arguments work.
If you want to test your logic radar, keep a Reasoning-Error Bingo Card handy — here are some of the most common moves to watch for:
- Anecdotal Evidence as Proof – moving personal testimonies presented as sufficient evidence.
- Cherry-picking – highlighting the few “hits” or successful moments and ignoring null or failed sessions.
- Facilitator/Ideomotor Bias – unacknowledged influence of helpers who already know the answers.
- Lack of Experimental Control – demonstrations without blinding or verification procedures.
- Equivocation on “Spelling” and “Communication” – shifting definitions of what counts as independent expression.
- Over-extension/Universal Claim – extrapolating from a handful of cases to “all nonspeakers.”
- Appeal to Emotion and Narrative Framing – using distressing or inspiring stories to disarm skepticism.
- Appeal to Authority – invoking credentials, research funding, or famous supporters in place of data.
- Confirmation Bias/Omission of Counter-Evidence – excluding decades of research debunking similar methods.
- Shifting the Burden of Proof – implying critics must disprove telepathy rather than producers proving it.
- Quantum-Language Hijack – invoking “quantum entanglement” or “energy fields” as pseudo-explanations.
- False Dichotomy (“open-minded vs. materialist”) – framing skepticism as moral or emotional failure.
- Paradigm-Appeal Fallacy – claiming we’re witnessing a scientific “revolution” instead of providing data.
- Ambiguous Success Criteria – redefining what counts as a correct answer or “connection.”
- Halo Effect through Compassion – moral halo from helping disabled children transferred to truth of the claim.
Ironically, in trying to transcend “materialism,” the series repeats Descartes’ old mistake — treating mind and matter as mutually exclusive instead of as aspects of a single natural order. That move saddles them with the same impossible burden Descartes faced: explaining how an immaterial mind could causally interact with the physical world on top of everything else they need to prove.
I had a realization that logical biases and fallacies form well-known patterns only at uni and only on my own.
I then had a much worse realization - that most people still don't know about them and that they don't care.
You can't make people care, that only comes when they are the ones getting hurt by others being manipulated. But you can give them tools to know what they should care about when that happens.
> For months, I was puzzled as to why a great number of listeners wholly ignorant of the autistic experience were so enamoured by The Telepathy Tapes. ... I feel I’m finally starting to understand. Moving forward, the series has expressed a desire to explore the wider nature of consciousness and explore topics outside of the autistic community.
It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end. It's a show about the paranormal and it appeals to people that want to learn about the paranormal.
The fact the the author has this 'revelation' about the true appeal at the end is strange. it'd be like having a big breakthrough that "i though people were watching The X-Files because they were all interested in learning about FBI bureaucracy, but it turns out people are interested in aliens!"
> It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end.
It has to be both. If it was just about "hey, look random fortune tellers are telepathic, let's watch 500 hours of video about it" that won't go anywhere. It would be dismissed right off the bat. But it has to be something like autism. Everyone has someone in their family or acquaintance circle who has autism nowadays. Some are non-verbal and it's sad and frustrating not being able to talk with them. Aha, but what if there was a way? - Telepathy to the rescue. So it's like a necessary two part thing.
What I don't like is that these things ignore the individual. Rather than dealing with "this is a nonverbal person, they likely have limited understanding" people that believe this garbage think "oh, this is a magic guru with super powers and wisdom beyond comprehension".
That becomes dangerous when it comes to watching these individuals. No, they really don't know to not play in the street. They don't know not to eat the berries. They aren't connected with animals and don't know some can hurt them.
They do care to push back though! It's just that there's much more of a market for wishful pseudoscientific bullshit than for careful, history and evidence based sceptical bashing of hopes. Just another example of how broken our information ecosystem is.
I learned about TT from my favorite podcast the SGU, where it was placed in the historical context of the FC controversy and then roundly debunked.
The Ganzfield experiments have been reproduced 78 times by 46 researchers and this review article concludes that anomalous cognition meets the standards of proof: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11134153/
The president of the American Statistical Association has reviewed the evidence for psi and said: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well-established”
Of course you don’t believe it because you listen to a podcast about skepticism so it’s a dogma for you, you’ve drawn your conclusion without even considering the evidence. Skepticism is a religion as much as Catholicism in Galileo’s time.
I listened to the first episode of the Telepathy Tapes, but then I read this article[0] and watched this video[1] of someone using a spellboard with their child and felt like Telepathy Tapes had deceived me.
I hope the people facilitating communication in the podcast aren't faking the communication as obviously as in that Instagram video, but the rest of the article showed specifics of the podcast where it feels like the host is using "sleight of hand" to present evidence in an overly strong way.
FC is always fake even thought the facilitator usually believes earnestly that it is real. It works partially through the ideomotor effect where the facilitator subconsciously makes physical queues to the letter they are thinking of next. There are plenty of tests where the facilitator is blind to a piece of information that the subject of facilitation can see and the FC always fails this test.
Are you serious? That video is nothing like the tests in the telepathy tapes, they have kids who don’t need to be touched at all and spell completely independently.
I hate this whole “skeptic” culture so much, it’s just as religious as the people who believe things without evidence. You have a preconceived agenda about things you were told are wacky and you don’t even bother to review the evidence before drawing a conclusion.
There is more rigorous peer-reviewed, published evidence for psychic abilities than most sociological and biological fields.
The Ganz experiment has been reproduced 78 times by 46 different researchers, but sure it’s all fake and a blogger and an one obviously fake strawman instagram video are suddenly enough evidence for the skeptics who constantly demand the highest standard of academic rigor from the other side.
First, the US and Russian governments did spend decades researching these abilities and in the US they CIA, DIA, Army, and other agencies all used psychics. Perhaps they are still using them, or maybe they found satellites and drones easier to work with.
The other issue is that psi seems to have strong statistical significance but low effect size. It’s not a crystal ball, the inconsistent results make it inconvenient for things like stock markets and espionage.
Finally, maybe people do use psychic abilities but they lack the introspection abilities to recognize it. Where do your thoughts really come from? If you’re a stock trader and you have a hunch or insight about an opportunity, where did it come from? Sure you likely gathered data and evidence to support your investment, but didn’t you first have a hunch or a fuzzy idea that seemingly came from nowhere?
We have much to learn about consciousness. I’m not asking anyone to accept psi on faith, but this culture of skepticism boils down to “psi isn’t real because psi can’t be real” and I believe it’s holding back our understanding of reality to be so close minded.
I listened to a few episodes on a recommendation. The episodes lead you to believe that the host is some agnostic person that's just curious about these reports. They are not as the original lead is from another superstition believer podcast.
They also present the cameraman as a token skeptic, who is of course quickly swayed into belief.
They lean heavily on a host of tricks with long histories of non-reproduction when tested rigorously.
A "scientist" (known crackpot and woo believer) is employed to make the experiments sound. And their terrible academic reputation was explained away using conspiratorial arguments.
I found TT wholly unconvincing and consider it a scam to get people to pay for the actual evidence. I won't pay of course and confidently assume it to be poor based on the publicly available material.
I haven't watched the TT but anecdote. One of our friends has an autistic child, but fairly high functioning. When he was about 6 or 7 one morning this child complained he didn't want to go to a weekly playground and told his mom the slide was broken and it wouldn't be fun. Mom said what are you talking about - when they arrived, the slide was literally broken. The friend said there was no possible way he should have known that (I don't know the details) but this child does not have a phone and is under non-stop supervision.
Of every story you've ever heard about this child, this singular event is your evidence for telepathy? Shouldn't that alone be strong evidence against your interpretation?
I'm reminded of the anecdotal, arbitrary miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels of the New Testament. An omniscient, all-powerful son of god chooses to prove his infinite power by providing wine at a party.
Or maybe there was another, much more likely and mundane explanation.
Selection/confirmation bias. Think of all the times the child told their mother some other random things which turned out not to be true. Those incidents don't stick out because children say nonsense all the time.
There are other possibilities, the most likely being that the slide was already in the process of breaking when the child used it last, and he noticed that before others did.
I am shocked that I cannot comment that we are not alone in our own minds. That an entire culture exists among us who can network our minds and meddle in our thoughts.
Or that conventional society is cognitively dissonant for ignoring this prevailing truth, even if the examples are confused and unscientific.
Science is not ultimate truth.
Science is constrained ignorance in pursuit of existential truths.
We are not alone in our own minds and an entire long standing culture exists among us who can mess with our thoughts.
I’ll name a few, though you won’t like them and it is important to know the super elite can mess with your mind while stone cold sober like you’re drunk out of your senses and you their hypnotized puppet. The mass mob culture train for years to perfect “special effects” which range from audible voices to weird sexual things, like infamous gaydar. Thought control culture is responsible for sexual dysphoria for instance. It’s like a mostly anonymized internet only networks among our minds. No inherent rules, only hierarchies among the mobs.
Special effects include: voices, spinning thoughts, emotional shifts. They can even give you farts.
Individually these things are mostly harmless and they obviously do these things because they are a culture of … jerks. Combined they can drive someone mad. Someone public shooting mad.
For the mentally (intellectually or emotionally) advanced, there are whole inner worlds within ourselves just as or more compelling than whatever is going on outside. Mostly they play there, and then screw with us when they want something.
What are they up to? They are the game masters. And their mobs caught up in their drama. Protected by the comfortable lie of modernity, these fiddle with us and influence our mindsets to drive our illusions of self determinism.
Anything more specific and I may be considered inflammatory.
Nemo saltat sobrius… nobody dances sober
nisi forte insanit… unless he is insane
Your user name, HN join date, and comment history (largely flagged) are intriguing to me. Do you have any longer form version of your ideas publicly available?
I share my normal as of you congenial side to acrue karma, so that I may burn it saying truthful things the mind coddled intelligentsia do not want to hear.
For me, these are the hare.
I will message something from your profile. Thanks for taking an interest in the greatest estrangement of our humanity.
I have had a hand full of former HN accounts. Some search condition (“thought control”) may reveal them all.
I also remember when hating Apple was cool you could not say one single good thing about the iPhone Mac etc they would just pile on you like it's high school all over again.
Remember the cool people are out and about, the un-cool will always be over-represented in internet discussion.
I can chime in to say: the scientific method, so far, cannot explain consciousness, and that the whole materialistic basis for physics is facing a crisis in the face of quantum mechanics, etc. Most of us have utmost confidence in a method that so far has nothing to say whatsoever about the most important quality of our existence: that we are aware.
The "scientific method" doesn't explain anything. It's a method for evaluating claims people make.
The fact that there is no scientifically verifiable theory of consciousness has no bearing on the science that helped people create, say, my computer monitor.
I have a pet theory (certainly unoriginal) that humans as a species feel a compelling need to indulge in some form of magical thinking in order to cope with existential horror.
A few things are simultaneously true:
1. We have a truly fantastic level of agency as actors in the world. A single human can build a house out of raw materials, write a book series with hundreds of settings and believable characters, start a war, etc.
2. In order to make the most of that agency, we need a psychological system that makes us feel empowered to use it. Having nature's most impressive brain would be pointless if we all believed everything we tried was doomed to fail anyway so we should just sit in the dirt and eat slugs.
3. We are also corporeal objects made of surprisingly fragile meat and bone subject to the careless whims of physics. Through no fault or intention of anyone, all of your agency can be completely taken in an instant. Just be standing in the wrong place when a tree branch snaps off, have one cell misdivide and become cancerous, choke on a grape.
We need 2 in order to make the most of 1. But the more we believe ourselves in control, the more horrific contemplating 3 becomes.
I often wonder if we evolved magical thinking and all of its manifestations like religion, parapsychology, destiny, fate, etc. in order to hold these three realizations in some sort of stable configuration.
“A tendency to superstition is of the very essence of humanity and, when we think we have completely extinguished it, we shall find it retreating into the strangest nooks and corners, that it may issue out thence on the first occasion it can do with safety.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That is funny because the occult/mystical system of Anthroposophy is built on the foundations of a Goethean approach to science.
In addition to the accidental things already listed under 3, there is also the additional points that:
- Other people exist and they also have a lot of agency, the exercise of which sometimes directly interferes with your life. Not to mention how much capacity bigger entities like countries have to mess with your life it they wanted to.
- In opposition to point 1: while humans do have tremendous agency, they also have very little agency when seen against how big the universe really is. There are more stars in the sky than people on Earth, by a considerable margin. Nobody can do anything at all to influence them. Hell, we can't even manipulate the orbit of our own planet in any meaningful way. I think many of the magical thinking paradigms are ways to cope with that as well.
Enter: the enduring appeal of superheroes.
Notably, entering as our supernatural folk heroes started to fade in the mass communication age.
> ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʜᴀᴘᴘᴇɴᴇᴅ ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴅɴ'ᴛ sᴀᴠᴇᴅ ʜɪᴍ?
> "Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"
> ɴᴏ
> "Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."
> ᴛʜᴇ sᴜɴ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ɴᴏᴛ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʀɪsᴇɴ
> "Really? Then what would have happened, pray?"
> ᴀ ᴍᴇʀᴇ ʙᴀʟʟ ᴏꜰ ꜰʟᴀᴍɪɴɢ ɢᴀs ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɪʟʟᴜᴍɪɴᴀᴛᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ
Just finished hogfather and loved it.
That need is not a cause, it's a reason. The cause is mental variation we have as a species and which is never openly talked about.
I enjoy mythologies and partake in magical thinking. Religion is a tool, you can use on yourself.
I don't mind 3. Two is a bit over the top, I feel. When I was atheist I didn't need such tools or believe everything would fail.
A different data point.
Is a game of poker magical thinking?
It can be, depending on your thought process while playing. If you're indulging in feeling like your willpower can affect what cards get drawn, then yes. If you're just thinking about betting strategy and your opponents, then less so.
My own magical thinking indulgence is fishing. I'll tell myself dumb stuff like "the next cast will be the one". I think any sort of gambling-like experience where random chance is heavily involved can be an outlet for magical thinking, healthy or otherwise.
My theory is that this all about "I know something you don't know." The people I have met with the most fringe theories don't have much agency in life. I suppose it could be a form of narcissism as well.
Humans make meaning, as far as we have observed we are the meaning making organ of the universe in a totally literalist physicalized sense. Stars convert mass to energy, humans convert energy to semantic meaning with high syntactic complexity, density and causal leverage.
We build the libraries, we deflect the asteroids for the foreseeable future (we really should check and see if dolphins would like thumbs.)
Flight existed before apes but - in a purely non-woo sense - a few of us gave the universe the how and why of it.
We haven't yet definitively ruled out the possibility of altering spacetime topology, or solving entropy, or plucking entities out of the light cone.
Humans tend to bring what they desire into the world. Wheat threshers, combines, tricorders, harry potter cloaks.
Listen to interviews of people who lived from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's. They say the whole damn world changed, everything changed.
Now,
A large contingent of Humans want eternal life, want resurrection.
There is this kind of speculative naturalists pascals wager at play right now that we are losing at.
Where a certain contingent of the population simply refuses to believe that the earth could be destroyed by an asteroid, or if it was it will be part of the fulfillment of their wishes for a new heaven and earth.
But if they have the least doubt in the quite moments of the night they need to realize. That if only what we empirically observe is stable and true, then their only hope for their desires coming true might be humans making it happen. We don't know yet, we just don't know, it's early days yet, nothing or everything might be in the future.
So we really need to preserve humans so they can keep making meaning, make our existence more resilient and keep pushing the edge and expansion of knowledge.
At one point humans thought travel to the moon was impossible, some living people still do, but the very strange implications is that us and other meaning making agents might actually fill the universe with meaning, we might end up giving the universe meaning, as semantically less complex dna bootstrapped us we may bootstrap the whole universe.
I find it highly unlikely but I cannot rule it out and no one else can either. We really need to protect human and the life we can see.
Ironically, scientism is also a manifestation of "magical thinking": Going through ritualistic motions of scientific appearances without actual understanding, getting positive feedback from the multitudes being just as incompetent.
Here, with the "Telepathy Tapes", the subject matter is immediately categorized as "magic": stuff deemed to be impossible because of it "obviously/implicitly contradicting scientific knowledge".
But that contradiction doesn't really exist? To give a decidedly clumsy, but entirely "physically possible", explanation of "telepathy": little green men from outer space might facilitate that effect using extremely advanced technology, hiding their presence and foiling attempts at getting easily understood evidence.
While such a scenario is highly inconvenient for current human academia to address, it's not "impossible" in any way? Isn't it really "magical thinking" to assume, such "outlandish" scenarios were excluded by natural law?
So, to explain one invisible and unprovable thing for which there is zero evidence, you have invented a completely different invisible and unprovable thing for which there is also zero evidence. Great job :)
There are many "invisible" things that exist. "Telepathy" isn't "unprovable". The "Telepathy Tapes" are evidence in favor of telepathy (It appears, you confuse "evidence" with "proof"). The explanation I suggested is neither "invisible" nor "unprovable". There actually is evidence for it as well (again, your idea of evidence is wrong).
In other words, your assessment is entirely counter-factual and simply false.
Noting the absurd down-votes on my comment in conjunction with the lack of comments providing any rational argument is actually evidence in favor of the hypothesis presented there.
> The "Telepathy Tapes" are evidence in favor of telepathy (It appears, you confuse "evidence" with "proof").
To the degree that "E.T." is evidence in favor of alien life, yes.
But don't you see? My two invisible things with no evidence support each other, giving each other evidence! Hey, what are you doing... put down that razor!
The problem with science approaching telepathy tapes is that a parent will say:
My kid knows when another kid is sick.
Scientist: We have to apply scientific rigor, so let's ask him for tomorrow's lotto numbers.
Parents: Yeah, we said he can tell you when another kid is sick and it's 100% correct every time.
Scientist: That proves this is all bullshit.
Ritualistic “magical thinking” stays the same regardless of outcomes or new information. Science does the exact opposite - predictive power determines what’s true. Nobody said your alien hypothesis is impossible; just that it’s highly implausible. No predictions, no evidence, no way to test it.
Your assessment of "magical thinking" being impervious to criticism funnily applies just the same to the attitude exhibited here regarding "fringed" ideas like "telepathy". The "Telepathy Tapes" are "new information", people's attitudes stay the same regardless.
"Predictive power" isn't the source of truth in science, evidence for that attribute is. Given even only a hint of such evidence, scientists are supposed to work in order to acquire more, not to ignore the hint because that work would inconvenience them.
You claim that "alien hypothesis" was implausible, but that statement would require solid arguments in its favor. And those don't exist. You rather argue from ignorance, but absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
Again, your pretense of "no predictions, no evidence, no way to test it" is simply counter-factual. You argue from ignorance. (To reiterate, evidence isn't the same as "proof")
The “Telepathy Tapes” aren’t new information. They repeat a setup already tested under controlled conditions: facilitators know the answers and guide participants through non-telepathic cues, usually without realizing it. When those cues are blocked, the “telepathy” disappears. Scientists did the rational thing, tried to replicate the effect, and it failed.
Absence of evidence isn’t proof of absence, but when every controlled test comes up empty, that’s the result. You might as well call a magician’s card trick new evidence for magic.
You invoke magic when you pretend, those "tests" were somehow "proof" instead of merely evidence against the claim.
Argument from authority is no valid scientific approach, neither is you putting up a straw-man (your claim how the supposed effect came to be). Just because that's how you can imagine how the "trick" might work doesn't mean, it's what's actually happening. Just because the result (dis-)pleases you doesn't mean, the experiment was done (in-)correctly.
I am not invoking magic. When proper controls are added, the effect disappears. That is probabilistic evidence against the claim, not proof of anything. Just the outcome of repeated tests.
No one is appealing to authority. The experiments are public, the methods transparent, and the results reproducible. If there is a better design, describe it.
Facilitator cueing is not a guess or straw man. It has been directly measured in controlled studies, and when those cues are removed, performance drops to chance. That is what the data shows.
You say tests are not proof, which is true, but repeated failure still counts. You call cueing a straw man, though it has been measured directly. Is there any outcome that would convince you the effect isn’t there? If not then this isn’t a discussion about evidence anymore.
Blocked & Reported (the podcast) did two episodes on this [1] and [2] that breaks down most of the controversy. This has completely ruined me on anything even adjacent to this, like whether Koko the gorilla could actually communicate.
[1] https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-210-facilitatin...
[2] https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-242-the-telepat...
A podcast manages to convince you, but you cannot tell what exactly the issue is that renders "anything even adjacent" logically impossible?
What about the possibility of being fooled the other way around, along with the majority? Truth isn't decided by majority vote after all.
Sure. But often one of the two sides has an obvious agenda.
I thought of James Randi and "spoon bender", Uri Geller. I suppose if you're cynical enough you can presume that both are desperate for airtime, self-promotion and we should therefore be skeptical of both.
Randi though for me has much less to gain in exposing frauds.
Being convinced without the ability to explain the argument is troubling.
But more importantly, mainstream scientists have the "obvious agenda" (well documented by now) to avoid ridicule and mockery. So if you're willing to weaponize ridicule and mockery, you can successfully suppress scientific investigation into whatever areas you choose.
Let's not forget, the CIA invented the very term "conspiracy theory" to suppress investigation into illegal intelligence activities.
I mean, at some point we are convinced as a convenience. You can use mathematical formulations describing _how_ a motor works without understanding why they are true. Similarly, I don't believe that there is a grand conspiracy involving chemtrails, even though I haven't proven that all the theories I've heard are false. I'm just fairly confident that this _could_ be done, given enough time and resources. But practically, I have to get on with my life.
Being lazy incurs costs. With regard to "conspiracies" that cost is explicitly vulnerability to them.
Neither "chemtrails", "UFOs&aliens" nor "telepathy" appear particularly "plausible". But that could just as well be a statement about your method of determining 'plausibility'?
You invoke limited personal resources to justify complacency. Likely, you estimate the costs of being wrong as negligible since you never really thought about possible implications and do not know about any being particularly relevant to you. That's an argument from ignorance.
Ya, I agree, my main point is that arguments from ignorance are acceptable sometimes. My main claim to schiffern is something like "Being convinced without the ability to explain the argument is sometimes fine." As specific examples, I propose chemtrails and how-motors-work. I think it is totally acceptable to dismiss the in-depth explanation for most people, because for most people they just aren't that important.
Are you claiming that you never dismiss anything without fully understanding it? Do you completely understand all of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Baha'i, etc? I think it is possible to generate an infinite list of things you don't fully understand. And yet you of course have to take a practical stance on some of these things for your everyday life.
> the CIA invented the very term "conspiracy theory"
I find the best conspiracies are supported by facts
Catch 22. The best way to avoid hard facts is to scare away scientists. ;)
But I agree, this is just garbage pseudoscience. I listened to the Banned & Reported episode, and TL;DR the Telepathy Tapes experiments had a non-blinded 'facilitator' touching the blindfolded 'psychic.' My mind immediately went to Clever Hans, before the podcast hosts even brought it up later in the episode.
Just watch any Derren Brown video to see how easy it is to 'cue' someone from across the room. This is James Randi 101, folks...
Of course Koko could communicate. The beef is over whether she engaged in true use of human language.
An ideal listen for anyone looking to sharpen their critical thinking. The reasoning moves are subtle, and it’s easy to miss the small leaps and omissions that reveal how persuasive but unsound arguments work.
If you want to test your logic radar, keep a Reasoning-Error Bingo Card handy — here are some of the most common moves to watch for:
- Anecdotal Evidence as Proof – moving personal testimonies presented as sufficient evidence.
- Cherry-picking – highlighting the few “hits” or successful moments and ignoring null or failed sessions.
- Facilitator/Ideomotor Bias – unacknowledged influence of helpers who already know the answers.
- Lack of Experimental Control – demonstrations without blinding or verification procedures.
- Equivocation on “Spelling” and “Communication” – shifting definitions of what counts as independent expression.
- Over-extension/Universal Claim – extrapolating from a handful of cases to “all nonspeakers.”
- Appeal to Emotion and Narrative Framing – using distressing or inspiring stories to disarm skepticism.
- Appeal to Authority – invoking credentials, research funding, or famous supporters in place of data.
- Confirmation Bias/Omission of Counter-Evidence – excluding decades of research debunking similar methods.
- Shifting the Burden of Proof – implying critics must disprove telepathy rather than producers proving it.
- Quantum-Language Hijack – invoking “quantum entanglement” or “energy fields” as pseudo-explanations.
- False Dichotomy (“open-minded vs. materialist”) – framing skepticism as moral or emotional failure.
- Paradigm-Appeal Fallacy – claiming we’re witnessing a scientific “revolution” instead of providing data.
- Ambiguous Success Criteria – redefining what counts as a correct answer or “connection.”
- Halo Effect through Compassion – moral halo from helping disabled children transferred to truth of the claim.
Ironically, in trying to transcend “materialism,” the series repeats Descartes’ old mistake — treating mind and matter as mutually exclusive instead of as aspects of a single natural order. That move saddles them with the same impossible burden Descartes faced: explaining how an immaterial mind could causally interact with the physical world on top of everything else they need to prove.
This should be taught in primary school.
I had a realization that logical biases and fallacies form well-known patterns only at uni and only on my own.
I then had a much worse realization - that most people still don't know about them and that they don't care.
You can't make people care, that only comes when they are the ones getting hurt by others being manipulated. But you can give them tools to know what they should care about when that happens.
Reminds me of how in the early 1980s we used my great-grandmother's Ouija board to spook ourselves to no end.
It was telling us names, giving us addresses, and all sorts of serious stuff you wouldn't expect adolescents to make up.
> For months, I was puzzled as to why a great number of listeners wholly ignorant of the autistic experience were so enamoured by The Telepathy Tapes. ... I feel I’m finally starting to understand. Moving forward, the series has expressed a desire to explore the wider nature of consciousness and explore topics outside of the autistic community.
It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end. It's a show about the paranormal and it appeals to people that want to learn about the paranormal.
The fact the the author has this 'revelation' about the true appeal at the end is strange. it'd be like having a big breakthrough that "i though people were watching The X-Files because they were all interested in learning about FBI bureaucracy, but it turns out people are interested in aliens!"
> It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end.
It has to be both. If it was just about "hey, look random fortune tellers are telepathic, let's watch 500 hours of video about it" that won't go anywhere. It would be dismissed right off the bat. But it has to be something like autism. Everyone has someone in their family or acquaintance circle who has autism nowadays. Some are non-verbal and it's sad and frustrating not being able to talk with them. Aha, but what if there was a way? - Telepathy to the rescue. So it's like a necessary two part thing.
What I don't like is that these things ignore the individual. Rather than dealing with "this is a nonverbal person, they likely have limited understanding" people that believe this garbage think "oh, this is a magic guru with super powers and wisdom beyond comprehension".
That becomes dangerous when it comes to watching these individuals. No, they really don't know to not play in the street. They don't know not to eat the berries. They aren't connected with animals and don't know some can hurt them.
> skeptics generally don’t care to push back
They do care to push back though! It's just that there's much more of a market for wishful pseudoscientific bullshit than for careful, history and evidence based sceptical bashing of hopes. Just another example of how broken our information ecosystem is.
I learned about TT from my favorite podcast the SGU, where it was placed in the historical context of the FC controversy and then roundly debunked.
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/
It’s not pseudoscientific, it’s one of the most rigorously studied topics in academia and has pushed the standard for psychology research: https://www.deanradin.com/recommended-references
The Ganzfield experiments have been reproduced 78 times by 46 researchers and this review article concludes that anomalous cognition meets the standards of proof: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11134153/
The president of the American Statistical Association has reviewed the evidence for psi and said: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well-established”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/202...
Of course you don’t believe it because you listen to a podcast about skepticism so it’s a dogma for you, you’ve drawn your conclusion without even considering the evidence. Skepticism is a religion as much as Catholicism in Galileo’s time.
I am eternally grateful for the SGU.
Our escape to reality indeed
I listened to the first episode of the Telepathy Tapes, but then I read this article[0] and watched this video[1] of someone using a spellboard with their child and felt like Telepathy Tapes had deceived me.
I hope the people facilitating communication in the podcast aren't faking the communication as obviously as in that Instagram video, but the rest of the article showed specifics of the podcast where it feels like the host is using "sleight of hand" to present evidence in an overly strong way.
[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-telepathy-tapes-...
[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_-ln0iO6i6/
FC is always fake even thought the facilitator usually believes earnestly that it is real. It works partially through the ideomotor effect where the facilitator subconsciously makes physical queues to the letter they are thinking of next. There are plenty of tests where the facilitator is blind to a piece of information that the subject of facilitation can see and the FC always fails this test.
I would guess it is hard on facilitators once they're caught out.
Nobody likes their beliefs to be shattered, especially when it is so brutally caring.
Are you serious? That video is nothing like the tests in the telepathy tapes, they have kids who don’t need to be touched at all and spell completely independently.
I hate this whole “skeptic” culture so much, it’s just as religious as the people who believe things without evidence. You have a preconceived agenda about things you were told are wacky and you don’t even bother to review the evidence before drawing a conclusion.
There is more rigorous peer-reviewed, published evidence for psychic abilities than most sociological and biological fields.
The Ganz experiment has been reproduced 78 times by 46 different researchers, but sure it’s all fake and a blogger and an one obviously fake strawman instagram video are suddenly enough evidence for the skeptics who constantly demand the highest standard of academic rigor from the other side.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11134153/
> There is more rigorous peer-reviewed, published evidence for psychic abilities than most sociological and biological fields.
If this proved that such things were real, there would be a corporation exploiting it by now.
That is folk logic, not rational thinking.
First, the US and Russian governments did spend decades researching these abilities and in the US they CIA, DIA, Army, and other agencies all used psychics. Perhaps they are still using them, or maybe they found satellites and drones easier to work with.
The other issue is that psi seems to have strong statistical significance but low effect size. It’s not a crystal ball, the inconsistent results make it inconvenient for things like stock markets and espionage.
Finally, maybe people do use psychic abilities but they lack the introspection abilities to recognize it. Where do your thoughts really come from? If you’re a stock trader and you have a hunch or insight about an opportunity, where did it come from? Sure you likely gathered data and evidence to support your investment, but didn’t you first have a hunch or a fuzzy idea that seemingly came from nowhere?
We have much to learn about consciousness. I’m not asking anyone to accept psi on faith, but this culture of skepticism boils down to “psi isn’t real because psi can’t be real” and I believe it’s holding back our understanding of reality to be so close minded.
I was interested to learn recently that Alan Turing believed telepathy was a real thing. At least that is what someone wrote.
I listened to a few episodes on a recommendation. The episodes lead you to believe that the host is some agnostic person that's just curious about these reports. They are not as the original lead is from another superstition believer podcast.
They also present the cameraman as a token skeptic, who is of course quickly swayed into belief.
They lean heavily on a host of tricks with long histories of non-reproduction when tested rigorously.
A "scientist" (known crackpot and woo believer) is employed to make the experiments sound. And their terrible academic reputation was explained away using conspiratorial arguments.
I found TT wholly unconvincing and consider it a scam to get people to pay for the actual evidence. I won't pay of course and confidently assume it to be poor based on the publicly available material.
PSA the appeal is the only perplexing part,
and ITT many of us agree, it's not perplexing, it's just humans engaging in the same magical thinking and coping strategies we always to.
The "telepathy" is 100% a fabrication of parents desperate to believe their situation and kids are something other than they are.
I haven't watched the TT but anecdote. One of our friends has an autistic child, but fairly high functioning. When he was about 6 or 7 one morning this child complained he didn't want to go to a weekly playground and told his mom the slide was broken and it wouldn't be fun. Mom said what are you talking about - when they arrived, the slide was literally broken. The friend said there was no possible way he should have known that (I don't know the details) but this child does not have a phone and is under non-stop supervision.
Of every story you've ever heard about this child, this singular event is your evidence for telepathy? Shouldn't that alone be strong evidence against your interpretation?
I'm reminded of the anecdotal, arbitrary miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels of the New Testament. An omniscient, all-powerful son of god chooses to prove his infinite power by providing wine at a party.
Or maybe there was another, much more likely and mundane explanation.
Selection/confirmation bias. Think of all the times the child told their mother some other random things which turned out not to be true. Those incidents don't stick out because children say nonsense all the time.
Or, perhaps the slide was cracked the previous week and now had completely failed.
There are other possibilities, the most likely being that the slide was already in the process of breaking when the child used it last, and he noticed that before others did.
My pre-adolescent child says all sorts of things, occasionally some of them turn out to be true!
I am shocked that I cannot comment that we are not alone in our own minds. That an entire culture exists among us who can network our minds and meddle in our thoughts.
Or that conventional society is cognitively dissonant for ignoring this prevailing truth, even if the examples are confused and unscientific.
Science is not ultimate truth.
Science is constrained ignorance in pursuit of existential truths.
We are not alone in our own minds and an entire long standing culture exists among us who can mess with our thoughts.
Can you give an example of what kinds of thoughts are "meddled" with?
I risk great karmatic death by over sharing.
I’ll name a few, though you won’t like them and it is important to know the super elite can mess with your mind while stone cold sober like you’re drunk out of your senses and you their hypnotized puppet. The mass mob culture train for years to perfect “special effects” which range from audible voices to weird sexual things, like infamous gaydar. Thought control culture is responsible for sexual dysphoria for instance. It’s like a mostly anonymized internet only networks among our minds. No inherent rules, only hierarchies among the mobs.
Special effects include: voices, spinning thoughts, emotional shifts. They can even give you farts.
Individually these things are mostly harmless and they obviously do these things because they are a culture of … jerks. Combined they can drive someone mad. Someone public shooting mad.
For the mentally (intellectually or emotionally) advanced, there are whole inner worlds within ourselves just as or more compelling than whatever is going on outside. Mostly they play there, and then screw with us when they want something.
What are they up to? They are the game masters. And their mobs caught up in their drama. Protected by the comfortable lie of modernity, these fiddle with us and influence our mindsets to drive our illusions of self determinism.
Anything more specific and I may be considered inflammatory.
Sounds like schizophrenia.
It is very like schizophrenia.
In fact, I doubt most accounts of voices in our minds could be technically considered schizophrenia by any scientific measure of the brain.
Nemo saltat sobrius… nobody dances sober nisi forte insanit… unless he is insane
Your user name, HN join date, and comment history (largely flagged) are intriguing to me. Do you have any longer form version of your ideas publicly available?
I share my normal as of you congenial side to acrue karma, so that I may burn it saying truthful things the mind coddled intelligentsia do not want to hear.
For me, these are the hare.
I will message something from your profile. Thanks for taking an interest in the greatest estrangement of our humanity.
I have had a hand full of former HN accounts. Some search condition (“thought control”) may reveal them all.
This place has always been babylon central.
I also remember when hating Apple was cool you could not say one single good thing about the iPhone Mac etc they would just pile on you like it's high school all over again.
Remember the cool people are out and about, the un-cool will always be over-represented in internet discussion.
I can chime in to say: the scientific method, so far, cannot explain consciousness, and that the whole materialistic basis for physics is facing a crisis in the face of quantum mechanics, etc. Most of us have utmost confidence in a method that so far has nothing to say whatsoever about the most important quality of our existence: that we are aware.
The "scientific method" doesn't explain anything. It's a method for evaluating claims people make.
The fact that there is no scientifically verifiable theory of consciousness has no bearing on the science that helped people create, say, my computer monitor.
Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of existential being. One might say existential reality peering back upon itself.
Awareness is merely a temporal feedback in the higher order cognitive biotechnology.
Awareness is the tip of consciousness. Consciousness is programmable, can be manipulated, augmented, even inhibited. All with or without awareness.