I just chuckled deleting some spam from a site asking the question Am I Psychic? I can answer that to a near 100% metaphysical certainty: No, You Are Not. Really, one has to wonder if that is spam well spent, even if it only took a few seconds to post I believe that was a few seconds utterly wasted.
FreeThoughtBloggers probably lean progressive as a group but that’s not mandatory or universal, it’s just a practical result of two-party system in the US where one party is compromised by money, a little spineless and at times scatter-brained, and the other one is bug-fuck crazy. What unites our writers and at least 90% of our commenters are refined critical thinking skills and healthy skepticism, often paid for with years of study in a solid field and some degree of natural mental discipline.
I was just reading through some of the comments here and on other FTB sites and they make me damn proud. We’ve only been in operation for a few weeks, starting with a skeleton crew and two guys, Ed Brayton and our tech person, doing the work of ten. Already the comments are of impressive quality and have been since the doors opened; even when you guys and gals are arguing with one another or something I wrote it’s done almost exclusively with evidence and reasonable inference. The idea that a psychic site is going to garner paying customers from the reality-based crew that patrols these cyber waters is every bit as pitiful as the exploitive wares they offer to the incredulous.
If I ever have enough spare cash there might be a vacation in my future. If any regular reader is interested I could see wanting some guest writers. And no, it’s not a requirement to hew to my politics or specific takes on any of the issues I regularly write about. Just one warning: it’s not a gig for the thin skinned. If someone takes the time to read something you wrote they’ve bought a ticket to rip into it.
I’ve never heard of a psychic winning the lottery. Seems a pretty poor track record.
Me and a friend went to a “Holistic Psychic Arts Fair” at one of the local new-age huckster churches, and they were raffling off an iPad, back when they were brand new.
We wanted to have one of us wait in the queue for a ticket, while the other stood at the head of the line squinting at people as they bought theirs and muttering, “no… nope… no…” Then when the other guy gets to the head of the line and buys a ticket grab him and ask to buy it for fifty bucks, then argue and see if we could get someone else to offer more.
We didn’t have the heart to go through with it, though…. All those people were so bloody sincere.
Though I did have my heart warmed by seeing a fortune teller with her table of equipment laid out, and among the divination apparatuses was- and I swear I’m not making this up- a Magic 8 Ball.
As Larry Niven said (paraphrase), If magic and psychic powers exist, they are so useless as to be neutral in evolution and have therefore probably been lost through genetic drift.
That’s a good point. Knowing what animals are thinking, or the future, would offer quite an adaptive advantage for selection to act on.
At least one scifi author has suggested that telepathy might actually be maladaptive for predators – it’s hard to kill prey when you suffer along with it. Although that might just encourage more efficient hunting techniques, or improved pain tolerance, or better control over what gets picked up and from where.
On the other hand, I’m hard pressed to think of a scenario where reliable precognition _wouldn’t_ be strongly adaptive. Maybe some kind of evolutionary arms race within or between species, whereby more and more resources are devoted to improving precognition with diminishing returns.