Psychic Accuracies

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This whole essay is based on beliefs and facts according to sources from history and the present. Throughout history, psychics have been not only been adored but also looked down on, their powers a subject of both belief and distrust. Yet, whether psychic powers are genuine or false, psychics have played a significant role in shaping world history. In centuries past, kings planned marriages and waged battles on the advice of their crystal ball gazers. Presently, they are used to answer one’s questions about their future plans or ways to fix a broken heart. In the modern era, psychics remain an important, if controversial part of society. Law enforcement has enlisted psychics, such as Sylvia Browne, to help them solve crimes. Browne is often …show more content…

Shaffer and Jadwiszczok from the Skeptical Inquirer (Vol 34.2) wrote the following: “Psychics who offer readings about missing persons and murder cases, however, allow researchers to examine their accuracy with independent information. When Sylvia Browne was a weekly guest on The Montel Williams Show, she performed supposed feats ranging from ghost detecting to offering details about missing persons and murder cases. Among the things Browne failed to predict was the availability of those transcripts on the Internet through databases such as LexisNexis. The authors, as well as several members of the James Randi Educational Foundation forum and StopSylvia.com, closely examined each transcript to track Browne’s accuracy. According to Browne, “my accuracy rate is somewhere between 87 and 90 percent, if I’m recalling correctly.” The article written argues that statistic by analyzing the criminal cases for which Browne has performed readings. It was determined that in 115 cases (all of the available readings), her confirmable accuracy was actually 0 …show more content…

The Federal Government has funded programs, such as Stargate, that examined individual powers of remote viewing. Dr Edwin May in 2015 revealed to Newsweek that he had tested a participant for such programs. He is currently trying to bring back to life a top secret ESP CIA program. Part of the controversy over psychics stems not only from a lack of substantiated evidence that psychic powers really exist, but also because many self-proclaimed psychics have later proven to be fraudulent individuals who have caused much emotional harm to people who have trust them. Pseudoscience, also known as black magic , in contrast to good science, often involves hand-picking and careful selection of words, events, and other information given to them they in turn make evidence that enables someone to believe them. This happens, for example, when a psychic offers a client a list of a dozen impressive predictions but carefully fails to tell them all the hundreds of failures. Any person or psychic who makes enough predictions (especially ones of a general nature) What’s needed when examining the evidence for psychic powers is the entire data set—all the predictions made, whether they turned out to be right, wrong, somewhere in the middle, or inconclusive—and establishing a success ratio. If the selection criteria are valid and the rate is significantly above

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