Are you arguing the tarot cards have any bearing on what you tell each person, or are you admitting they are just an excuse and what you say to each people is based on other things?
Because I can sort of understand the latter, but how would you even justify the former here on HN, a forum for tech and science oriented people?
The sense I get from the person, what the cards say, and what my own predispositions say, all have a bearing on what I say during a reading. As for justifying the part determined by the cards, I can offer two:
-they might simply be a way of limiting what I can say since I'm not going to tell someone something completely counter to the traditional meaning. That limitation might force me to be more creative than if I was just going off my own predispositions alone.
-I also would hope tech and science oriented people wouldn't rule out that the question being asked has a bearing on what cards show up before running an experiment. I'm agnostic on that point myself, but I could expound at least two theories that would allow for that kind of foreshadowing without contradicting any beliefs that are held by at least a plurality of the HN crowd. What is contradicted by that belief is our instincts based on Newtonian physics, but those have already been proven incomplete.
Have you ever considered that your practise might be harming real people based on what sounds like pretty much inferences? Like you might just be messing up a perfectly good relationship someone has, or anything like that?
I got fired from a job one time because the woman running it decided I was the reason that the business was "cursed". I got yelled at in French, a language I don't understand, and only understood after the other person I was working with found me in a nearby park confused as to why I had just been yelled at and fired. Turns out boss had hired this guy to come in and do a tarot reading, and because of my star sign and the reading he said I was the reason things weren't working (It was literally because she had purchased a grill from wal-mart which had lied about how hot it could get instead of investing in something commercial). Even better was how she shut the whole business down right after this, all based on the word of one man with a deck of medieval divination cards which she seemed to put all of her belief in.
As a result I fucking lie about my birthday to strangers to say I'm an aquarius and I find people like me a lot more. I honestly do my best to avoid those people though, don't want the experience of someone making up insane bullshit and blaming me arbitrarily again. That was horrible.
> I also would hope tech and science oriented people wouldn't rule out that the question being asked has a bearing on what cards show up before running an experiment
Yes, we would rule it out, short of the Tarot reader secretly manipulating the deck.
There's no polite way of saying this, so I'll be straight: that's magical thinking. You cannot influence what cards show up just by the question you ask: you can only do so by actually manipulating the deck with your bare hands (or having a trick deck).
There's no two ways about this. Experiments have been conducted time and time again. Anyone able to reproduce the claimed effect would be rich by now.
No such experiment is possible, because the cards don't have single meanings. Any completely random set of results will look meaningful to a tarot card reader, because that's the whole point of the reading. Can you imagine an experiment that would allow for a negative result?
Sure: have clients submit readings that were 'hits' in their own subjective experience, generate several random readings, and present them to professional readers along with the real reading and a description of what actually happened. If the readers can't guess the actual reading above chance, it's a negative result. Of course, you can't get a double blind unless the description is supplied by someone who doesn't know what the original reading was, so it might be a hard experiment to carry off.
But I get the wider point; meaning and facts aren't exactly the same thing.
If I understand your proposed experiment correctly, it's not at all suitable to demonstrate the question determines what cards come up.
What your experiment would do, if successful, would be to provide evidence that given a set of ordered Tarot cards, experts agree on what is the interpretation [1], that is, that the interpretation itself is not random but it derives by well known rules from the set of cards. Note this has nothing to do with showing the cards were in any way influenced by the question!
[1] this would be big enough, since we know no two Tarot readers agree on the interpretation of any set of cards, so I expect the experiment would fail to demonstrate there's a deterministic interpretation.
I'm not sure you do understand it. My hypothesis is that if knowing the actual events of a 'successful' reading allows one to infer what cards were drawn, that there's a causal relationship between what cards are drawn and how successful the reading is.
But I think the question of experimentation risks obscuring an important point you touched on, namely the distinction between facts and meaning. They're certainly not the same thing, I think of them as three-dimensional and four dimensional analyses of the same dataset. If divination is worth anything it's because it deals with meaning, but the relation of that to the facts of the situation being examined is ambiguous.
The experiment wouldn't show this at all. It would simply provide some evidence there's some kind of "objective" reading of a given Tarot result, not that it was predetermined by the cards.
It's easy to provide a counterexample: suppose I ask the same question N times, and N times the cards show different results, and each time the "experts" agree on a single interpretation. This in no way shows that the question determines the result; it merely shows there is an agreed upon procedure to interpret the result of cards.
Let me give you a simple example: let's say the question is "what lies in my future?" and each time it gets asked, a single Tarot card is drawn. Each time a different card gets drawn (for the same question and same person asking), but all experts agree on this interpretation: "the card is a picture of (thing)".
This interpretation is deterministic, every expert agrees on it, yet the card drawn doesn't get determined by the question.
I hope I have shown your experiment is flawed.
As for the rest of your comment re: meaning vs fact, I'm sorry but it's the same old cop-out all mystics end up claiming whenever backed against a wall.
What I'm proposing is a variation on an experiment that's been run many times in remote viewing settings and it goes as follows:
1. Person A puts a picture in a vault.
2. Person B draws a picture of what they think is in the vault.
3. Person A groups the picture person B drew with three other pictures and hands them, along with the picture in the vault, to person C.
4. Person C compares the picture in the vault to the four drawings they've been handed and decides which is the closest.
If the picture person B drew is judged closest, it's a positive result. If positive results happen to a statistically unlikely degree, it's evidence for psi being real[1].
What I'm suggesting is replacing the picture in the vault in step 1 with a life event and the drawing in step 2 with drawing a card from a deck. The 'life event' makes it a difficult experiment to run practically, but nothing is impossible about the basic experiment of having a double-blinded judge match a prediction with an outcome.
Note also, while there's ample evidence that a qualified remote viewer can draw an accurate picture better than chance, I remain agnostic as to whether a qualified tarot reader can pull an accurate card better than chance. The skill might be entirely in the interpretation. But that just narrows down the question of how it works as something weird in the human nervous system, there might also be something weird in how random events happen. It helps my practice to leave that question open, though if there were an experiment like the one I suggested which did answer it, I'd be very interested in reading the results.
[1] since we're talking about backing against a wall, what do you do when presented with evidence like this?
P<10^-4. Note I pulled this one from google scholar at random after searching remote viewing experiments, there are many more like it. Parapsychology reproduces much more reliably than regular psychology, there's too much scrutiny not to.
> 1. Person A puts a picture in a vault. 2. Person B draws a picture of what they think is in the vault. 3. Person A groups the picture person B drew with three other pictures and hands them, along with the picture in the vault, to person C. 4. Person C compares the picture in the vault to the four drawings they've been handed and decides which is the closest.
Without knowing the details of the experiment, just from that description there are so many potential methodological problems there! Especially if conducted by someone on the fringe of science which doesn't understand how to do a proper experiment. For example, what's the communication between persons A, B & C. Is this double-blind? How are the other drawings chosen? What does "closest" mean, and is it mentioned verbally, do they fill out a form with rankings, or what? How are candidates B & C chosen?
What I'm telling you may seem unfair, but it's reasonable to cast these doubts because the people who would conduct and participate in this kind of experiment belong to a self-selecting group that doesn't understand how to conduct scientific experiments. They could of course be doing everything right, but there is good reason to be doubtful before we know the details.
Since, as you know, mainstream science doesn't currently consider PSI a real phenomenon. Would you say this is because of a conspiracy to suppress the truth, a dismissal because mainstream science is narrow minded, or what? Claims about PSI aren't nothing new, so this isn't "new stuff" they are skeptical about.
> Note also, while there's ample evidence that a qualified remote viewer can draw an accurate picture better than chance
Where is this ample evidence? Does the mainstream scientific consensus agree with your assertion?
> Parapsychology reproduces much more reliably than regular psychology, there's too much scrutiny not to.
This is not established, but also: we are comparing parapsychology to science; if you want to argue some or all branches of psychology aren't science either, feel free, but that's a different argument. There's no reproducibility and no scientific method to it. If you (you == not just you, Suo, but anyone) can reproduce parapsychological "experiments", how come you did not win the Amazing Randi challenge?
PS: the two experiments you posed don't even seem equivalent! We are still not demonstrating the question determines the cards!
A very simple one is a variation on the simulation hypothesis - if the simulation has only one RNG, we'd expect similar patterns to show up in all random data sets related to the same event, which could be interpreted by someone who's studied them.
I don't subscribe to the simulation hypothesis myself in a literal way, but I'm working on something like the above theory using the language of QBism. If you're familiar with the quantum eraser, it's a variation on the double slit experiment where the photon is split into two entangled photons, and the observation of one is made after the other has already impacted the photosensitive screen. My interpretation of the results is that reality is quite dependent on perspective, and facts determined in the future at larger scales can affect the paths taken to them in the present. How that could affect a card shuffle isn't obvious, hence why I'm agnostic on that question. But it certainly suggests a mechanism for precognition as it's tested in the lab [1] and it's possible that only certain cards are 'significant' when viewed from the final result, which might tilt the odds of how a shuffle turns out as some biologists believe happens in adaptive mutation[2].
If you're interested in this line of inquiry I've got an essay series up on the subject and would welcome feedback [3].
[1]Radin, Dean I. "Electrodermal presentiments of future emotions." Journal of Scientific Exploration 18.2 (2004): 253-273.
Unless you are a physicist, I wouldn't invoke quantum anything. If I'm not mistaken, randomly quoting "quantum" to support fringe theories is one of the key items in the Crackpot Index.
There is absolutely no doubt in science that posing a question has any influence in the order shuffled cards come up. None. No amount of links to quantum this or that, or adaptive mutations, or any other unrelated stuff is going to change that.
I hate that I have to be this direct with you, since your tone is friendly, because it makes me sound aggressive. However, the hard truth is that you're basically arguing garbage, a variation of "there's much we don't know, let's keep an open mind" which has been a tactic of pseudoscientists and scammers since forever.
To be honest, I liked it better when I thought you were admitting the cards themselves where irrelevant, a focus point for your own ramblings about the customer.
I have very limited experience of Tarot readings, and I have never been to a professional reader. But I have been trained to read them by somebody who has produced their own deck, so they are quite into it.
My limited understanding is that one can ”read” them so that the subject is questioning the cards and the person doing the reading is kind of guiding the process.
This works, because we repeat patterns in our life, and subconsciously we must know these patterns, otherwise we could not repeat these patterns.
The cards are kind of giving us another angle to these patterns, allowing those subconscious patterns to become conscious.
When we learn these patterns that we repeat in life, we can become free of them. So in a way it is poor man’s psychitheraphy.
So why not do psychotherapy then? I know there are arguments against psychotherapy, but surely all of it doubly applies to Tarot reading -- which is way less regulated, with far less oversight and peer review (I mean it in the broadest possible sense, of course I don't expect a peer reviewed article on "Nature")?
As for the peer review —- after the replication crisis of psychology, I don’t put too much value in scientific process in that or related fields. When we live in scientific ”wild west”, one has to try to find the truth oneself, being both open-minded and critical. That is why I tried Tarot when a friend suggested it, and then learned what I wrote above. And I was very critical of the whole idea of Tarot, because I believed like most people do that it is just completely made up magical thinking. What I learned is not something I have read anywhere or been told by somebody. It is hard-earned piece of information.
> after the replication crisis of psychology, I don’t put too much value in scientific process in that or related fields
I thought I had preempted this in my comment: whatever criticism of psychology and therapy there is, it applies tenfold to fringe stuff like Tarot.
There may be a crisis of replication in psychology, but there is simply no replication or oversight or peer review at all with Tarot and occultism in general.
This is what strikes me as very odd about people's beliefs in occult and fringe stuff: their standards of proof are completely imbalanced against science. "Nobody has proof vaccines work", "doctors are spreading falsehoods", etc, and yet -- "the friend of my cousin is a Tarot reader, you wouldn't believe how accurate he is!". Say what? What happened with the skepticism about medicine and science, did it fly out the window the minute a psychic friend of my aunt's grocer said I should try Bach's Flowers?
I think your comment about ”trading with the occult” below is related to the point you make here: people appear to have different level of skepticism toward ”science” and ”occult”.
I don’t want to go too much on a tangent here, but in my experience, it is about trust.
People have lost their trust that in multiple fields the scientific process works as it should, and by association, they have lost their general trust in ”The Science” as well.
This is because scientific community as a whole has failed to come up with measures proportional to the problems. I think this lack of trust makes sense, although it probably is based on emotional reaction for most people, rather than rational thinking.
Trust is in short supply nowadays, so people grasp even the little trust they see. And that is more likely to be their neighbor.
This may make you angry, but the science needs to earn the trust again if we want have the level of trust to be like it used to be.
My problem with what you are arguing has multiple sides.
First, science brought us here. The people mistrusting it are using computers, tech, medicine and are possibly alive (or their ancestors were, anyway) thanks to scientific or protoscientific advances. So their skepticism is demonstrably misplaced. And what exactly are they skeptical about, anyway? "Big Pharma"? Well, that's conflating science with business -- and while there might not be such a thing as "Big Tarot" (plenty of scammers though, in the sense of preying on the weak), there's even less oversight for Tarot, so every problem you can spot with scientific endeavors is manifested tenfold with fringe practices!
What about "regaining" trust? I don't think that's at all possible given the unequal battle between science and baloney. It takes basically nothing to make magical claims. There are no experiments, no standards, no testable assertions, it only takes some charlatan claiming the Third Moon of Jupiter or the Death card means that some stranger in your future yadda yadda. But science is built on an edifice of failures and tribulations, I can even talk about the "replication crisis" of science and that alone will tell you there's oversight!
I guess that's it: science can speak about its failures; charlatans will eventually be shunned by their peers. With Tarot, palm reading, etc, they never speak about failures, there's no oversight and nobody gets shunned because they are all charlatans.
How can science "fight" against that to "win" public trust, when science by its own method MUST (eventually) admit its mistakes, whereas Tarot will not, ever?
No charlatan successfully won the Amazing Randi's (R.I.P.) bet. No Tarot reader either. The other person in this conversation making claims you can influence which cards get drawn by asking a question -- that would have won a tidy sum if demonstrated to Randi, how come it never happened? Shouldn't that demolish any of their fringe claims, or do people "mistrust" Randi as well?
Science may have brought us here, but that is part of the problem. That was the science of that time. That is not the same science we have today.
I think it is analogous to a some high quality product brand name that has started selling some pure crap under the same brand name, while still also selling quality products.
When people trust the brand name, they believe it guarantees the quality. For me, the "product strategy" of selling crap under the quality brand name is form of lying. These people are both selling crap and lying about the quality. To me that is worse than just selling crap and not lying about it. And if you buy one crap product, you will lose the trust to the whole brand name very quickly, as has happened with "the science".
I see Tarot etc. are more like hand-made products on some stereotypical African market. Nobody guarantees anything. Many people try to cheat you. But you might also find good quality products from one seller. Perhaps later you find out the quiet guy who produced these solid products, one who has craftmanship. And little by little you start trusting him as you see what he has done. To me that might produce more healthy attitude than blind trust in a market that is incentiviced to produce crap.
The etymology section on Occult Wikipedia page says 'as opposed to "knowledge of the measurable", usually referred to as science.' I think one needs to be very clear about this distinction. Randi's "trick" was to imply that everything is measurable. But not everything is measurable. Quality, for instance, ultimately cannot be measured. Quality can be experienced, and most people can agree on quality when they see it. But still, nobody can define objective measures about quality.
The people Randi challenged were goalpost movers. They claimed pretty wild things until challenged, in which case they didn't like it and didn't accept the challenge, or argued they didn't really claim what they had claimed (often on record).
He merely asked them to demonstrate the powers they claimed they had when duping people. Is that "measuring"? Why, if you claim you can move a spoon with your mind, or read other people's minds, or that you can predict the order of Tarot cards, is it unfair to ask you to demonstrate in an environment not controlled by your confederates? Is that "measuring"?
I think Randi was right, and Tarot is a swindle.
Scammers and swindlers attacked Randi as a person when they really should have put their... um, powers where their mouth was and shut Randi up by demonstrating what they claimed. A neat prize awaited them! Of course, no-one ever claimed that prize because it's all bullshit.
> But still, nobody can define objective measures about quality.
This isn't true, there are tons of metrics about quality. In software it can be fewer that N bugs per M lines of code, or whatever. For knives it could be sharpness and lack of brittleness (measured). For airplane models it could be fewer than N crashes per decade or whatever.
More importantly, fringe pseudoscientists made actual measurable claims and only backed out when Randi warned them he would monitor the demonstration and bar any confederates from messing with it! So there's no "trick" except that of those refusing those very fair conditions.
Good that you are not buying, because I am not selling.
I am sure Randi exposed lots of charlatans, and my point is not to defend them. There are certainly lots of charlatans in those fields. There are charlatans everywhere, even in science.
My point was that no sensible person would take on Randi's offer, because ultimately you need to claim that something that cannot be measured can be measured. And that is not possible, because not everything can be measured. And those things that can be measured, would not be "paranormal" by Randi's standards.
I never said that there are no measurements for certain aspects of quality. If you care to look, you can see measurements even for certain aspects of things Randi would call paranormal. For example, there have been found measurable neurological changes in people who engage in certain kinds of meditation for extended periods.
But those aspects are consequences of the thing, they are not the thing itself. I don't see it very useful to argue about this. If you do not see that there are things that cannot be measured, we will not get much further in this discussion. And we we are already way too much on a tangent here anyway. Thanks for the discussion.
Just to make sure, I am not the same person you originally commented.
I just wanted to add my 2 cents and tell that Tarot can be something else than what people typically think it is.
It is not scientific and I am not claiming it is. But I think science in these fields is not scientific either —- that is what the replication crisis implies.
However I find interesting that your preconception of Tarot seems so strong that you believe I have somehow taken something a friend suggested at face value. Nothing I wrote suggests that.
Tarot cards do not have to be scientific to be useful. Would you be against Brian Eno creativity cards that just give you a suggestions on what to think, such as ”What to increase? What to reduce?”
Hopefully we can both agree that such cards can be useful when stuck with a problem and you need to invent new ideas. Do you need scientific proof of them once you see that it obviously works? Tarot cards can be used in very similar manner.
Yes, I can certainly agree that Tarot cards in the sense you mean -- the same sense as jogging, taking a shower or doodling on a piece of paper -- can help one's mind become unstuck on a problem.
But how many Tarot readers are going to agree with your interpretation? You know they trade on the occult.
In my experience it can potentially help you unstuck a little bit better than jogging for two reasons. As you are approaching the question you are interested in systematically from multiple directions, it gives you more perspectives. Also, the symbolism in the cards appear to be efficient in encouraging new ways of thinking. That was Jung’s idea as well: the symbolism is closely related to certain deep patterns of our thinking, and that in itself is helpful.
You are asking how many people use the Tarot cards in this manner. Firstly, the number is non-zero because I am doing it, and I know others who do it. Secondly, as I do not believe the cards are magical, I believe everybody who is getting some meaningful results are using the Tarot cards in this way, even if they are not conscious about it.
I think the question you really want to ask is that how many people believe the carda have some supernatural powers. I don’t really know, but I would suspect that most people using them. This is partly because the reputation they have, and strong opposition to the cards just increases this reputation.
You ask whether people understand that they are ”trading with the occult”. I do not understand what you are asking. It appears that you so mot believe in the supernatural. If you did, I would get the impression that you think anything occult is really bad (i.e. from the devil) and god-fearing people should avoid it. But if one does not believe in the supernatural, then ”occult” is just a word.
Yes, I understand you don't believe the cards are magical. Everything you've said so far points to you taking them as some sort of psychotherapy, a way of introspecting with the help of some external tools. I think it's exactly like doodling on a piece of paper, but I'm ok if you disagree.
I think most people and almost every Tarot reader -- regardless of what they privately believe -- is going to "sell" you Tarot in one of two ways:
1. "oh, it's just a game! Don't take it seriously! Though the cards sometimes speak the truth... for example, my cousin one day was told that [anecdote]" <-- this take irritates me because it's the most dishonest. Be brave and take a stand! Either you believe there's something going on or you don't, don't cowardly hedge your bets.
2. "The cards are magical, there's a system to them, they channel the energies of [explanation]" <-- I bet most people believe this, or in the case of Tarot readers, claim to believe it for the sake of their customers. And it's bs.
No-one really claims "this is just therapy to get you unstuck, you could just as well doodle with a pencil, but let's use these expensive cards/sessions instead". Well, you are sort of claiming it here, but most people don't. I've never met a Tarot... uh, "fan", who claimed this, for example.
> But if one does not believe in the supernatural, then ”occult” is just a word
Sorry, I didn't address this. Of course I don't believe in the supernatural or the devil, so my reaction against this is not from a "God fearing" perspective.
I mean "the occult" as in "fringe practices that claim to use the supernatural, spirit world, etc." and I object to it because it's fraudulent and harmful magical thinking. I'm not worried about the "spirit world" itself, because it doesn't exist; I'm just worried about the bullshit.
"Occult" is indeed just a word that means "hidden", but its actual usage has implications.
I have never participated in Tarot in professional setting so I cannot answer why others do it. I probably would not do it if I had to pay somebody for it.
I have done psychotheraphy though and it was not very useful beyond having somebody listen to you attentively.
In my very limited experience Tarot was more useful and cheaper — hence poor man’s psychotheraphy.
Because I can sort of understand the latter, but how would you even justify the former here on HN, a forum for tech and science oriented people?