Your stance of Psychics/Law of Attraction ie all the weird stuff!

For the physic thing it can best be explained as when something is randomized enough you are bound to get the answer you want....the way I see it there are billions of people on the earth, if billions of people are all guessing what is going to happen in the future then it is statistically impossible for no one to be right...if you want evidence of a physic they couldn't simply see one major event coming, they would have to make predictions about several with a high success rate....and I would need to predictions to be specific in nature, more specific then Nostradamus

 

Great post INTJ, and great Briggs-Myers outcome too. It's the one I got the first time.

I put all faith in science, and strongly disbelieve anyone who says they are a psychic. Put any and all vagueness into a guess and hindsight allows a person to fit what they said to an event, and the outcome looks like uncanny predictions. Being a psychic does take skill, but it doesn't take supernatural power. How else could rinky-dink crystal and palm reading places stay in business without winning the lottery or knowing their next customer's name?

The way you describe the law of attraction, however, is very thought-provoking. I've toyed with the idea myself without knowing that's what it was called. Some aspects of my life have fallen neatly into place exactly as I hoped for, against all probability or realistic ability to control, such as my own physical appearance and opinion shifts on a worldly scale. Of course saying that this effect is a "law" is premature at best and outright pseudoscience at worst, but it is at least worth some long-term testing.

<<Looking forward to seeing more of your posts. I love science stuff!

 

I consider such things unlikely to be true. I've yet to see any evidence that can't be explained by random chance or trickery, and as such, I assume it doesn't exist.

 

Psycic powers are usually based upon interesting tricks and deceptions, similar to how con artists work. Practicioners make use of techniques like "hot/cold reading", hot reading being the use of pre-learned facts about the target (via listening to conversations prior to the performance, having a basic background check on the audience, etc). Cold reading is some basic techniques that involve both getting the target to reveal information about themselves without their knowing, as well as making good guesses (and convincing the target that they're closer to the truth than they really are). Other techniques include making general statements that seem at first to be insightful, but in reality could refer to large groups of people or things. An example would be saying "I see the ghost of your great-grandfather... he's clutching his chest... I see a blackness in his chest, a blackness that killed him". It sounds insightful, but it really isn't that fantastic, as:

A) Chances are everyone's great-grandfather is dead.
B) Most causes of death occur in some part of the chest (aside from strokes/bleeding out)

Even if the the guess is wrong (MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER WAS DECAPTITATED), the practicioner can still smoothly claim they were on the right track ("Perhaps what took his life started in his heart, but moved to his brain"), or can claim "The powers aren't working today"/"I can only see a foggy impression of things beyond the grave".

It's just another form of stage magic tricks.

As for the Law of Attraction, it is completely bs. There is no scientific basis for how a human mind could actually directly affect reality (such as creating cars at your whim ). There isn't even a logical basis for it, since what would happen if two people's thoughts came into conflict (i,e Both Bob and Jim want the promotion, but only one can get it. Whose positive thoughts will win out?). The idea that humans, and humans alone, have magical powers that allow us to manipulate the Universe with our minds, to get petty things like wealth or fame, is an arrogant one. I'm all for positive thinking, but that's not what the "Law of Attraction" claims. It's saying that your thoughts literally control reality; that if you want that car bad enough, if you think of it enough, you will get it. What if you don't? Well think harder next time.

 

I might be getting deeper than the scope of the thread by saying this, but there could be far more to reality than what we know. A greatly simplified way of looking at it is saying we may be in a cosmic game of the Sims, and some grand computer is actually making all observable occurrences happen, and possibly some that defy conventional cause. I don't remember all the details of the theory, but one can start out by researching "Is the universe a holographic reality?" There is at least one article about that.

^^All that paragraph is meant for, though, is saying to keep an open mind. When faced with something so improbable as to be ridiculous, scientists still give the idea the respect of experimentation. Once they prove that it is false, only then do they close the book and look elsewhere.

 

Please spare me. They didn't make an incredibly accurate prediction — at all.

This was the exact transcript of their prediction:

How on earth is "in 2002" an accurate prediction? 9/11 happened in 2001. Even if they had said 2001, then I wouldn't give a prediction that spans a whole year the description of "accurate" by any stretch of the imagination.

And let's say you can get over the whole not being accurate thing. But, tell me this: do you really consider this kind of a prediction made in passing on a radio show to be amazing? If they were certain, why didn't they make any efforts to stop it? If they truly believed such an attack was going to occur, then I'm sure they would have done something to stop it. And, if they really had predicted it, why didn't they make a bigger deal about it beforehand? If I was certain someone of that magnitude was going to occur, and knowing that this would prove that I was indeed psychic, I would mention it more than once. For God's sake: all they did was mention it in passing on one radio show! This was not a headline prediction of theirs.

The thing is that people make these kinds of predictions all the time. Nothing happened in South Carolina or Georgia "by July 2002", but I don't see you mentioning how they got this wrong. These fraudsters and people like them make hundreds of predictions, and when some of them turn out to be even remotely in tune with something that has happened, they focus in on them. This was one radio show. They appear on radio shows all the time and they say piles of things that don't come true.

To answer your question in the title: the "Law of Attraction" is a load of nonsense. Psychics are frauds. The best psychic I ever saw was someone who openly admitted that he was not a psychic, but instead using the method described by 4AllEternity above.

 

Well, I won't say that it's impossible or that I "know" the universe is not a simulated reality. However in the case of psychics or other supernatural phenomenae, there are other, simpler explanations that make more sense (see "Occam's Razor"), such as psychics using simple manipulation techniques.

 

The whole thing about the law of attraction I believe in it to an extent. I believe that positive people bring positive things into their lives. It's not the positive mind that brings positive things, it's the way we all handle these situations. Some people will see something as a curse while others will see something as a blessing. We can learn things about ourselves from positive and negative experiences.

Example: Someone gets diagnosed with a life threatening disease or cancer and eventually overcomes it.

Some people would see this as a negative thing, and bring themselves down and be negative, Where as others may see it as a way to find ways to make their bodies stronger and their minds and try to overcome this disease or cancer. I don't really believe it's just about thought, but a lot of the time, if you believe in doing something you have the awareness and will eventually do it. I just believe the choices we make, either help or hinder us. If someone is depressed they may make bad decisions or decide to do things that could potentially harm them, where as someone in a more positive mind frame wouldn't choose to do certain things.

 

An interesting book on the subject is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It talks about the subconscious and how it may send signals that the conscious mind doesn't understand. For examle, a fire fighter was in a house and had a really bad feeling. He evacuated and it turned out that what had been believed to be a stove fire had gotten into the floor also. Was the feeling ESP or perhaps his subconscious picking up on the temperature gradients in the room not being expected. The book is a lot of looking at the variables defined and looking for what was forgotten. If you are doing an experiment and your results do not match the expected outcome, you need to examine your variables not say "it is magic!!!".

I believe in the law of attraction to the extent that once you define your goals, you are more focused on achieving them.

 

I don't like that you said, "all the weird stuff" It implies certain negative connotations... And the main ideology behind all of it is to maintain positivity. I think people are entitled to believe whatever they want to believe. And if, like me, these concepts are part of their beliefs, then its nobody else's business. So, how about you actually think before you write something stupid like that again? x(

 

You are correct that if someone has a different viewpoint than me, I will not kill them and their family. However, that doesn't afford them immunity from having to hear my viewpoint. The argument "Everyone can have an opinion" is usually a weakminded one used when a person is hearing things that challenge their views, and rather than considering the new information, they reject it, out of fear of change.

So while it's not my business to decide what you believe in, I'm still entitled to discuss my opinions of your beliefs. If you don't want to hear them, than leave, don't try and silence them.

 

In the OP's defense, things not understood by science are almost, by definition, "weird." It doesn't have to have a negative connotation. Even things that ARE understood can be weird. Have you ever seen a platypus?

 

There had already been a few attacks on the world trade center prior to 9/11. So it was not a stretch to predict a future attack, and picking a random year you still had a pretty good chance of being close.

 

Ah, so now you're calling me weak minded? Is that what this is coming to? Personal insults? Because I have plenty of those. And believe it or not, I wasn't trying to silence anyone- Merely express my reaction and personal opinion on the way you worded something. I can't believe you never learned to think about offending someone before you write. It's really not that difficult. There's a difference between politely disagreeing and crudely attacking someone else's beliefs.

 

I won't lie to you to protect you from your insecurities; if you can't handle hearing a differing opinion, that's your problem, not mine. I think saying that trying to hide from an argument that challenges your beliefs is weak-minded is putting it a lot kinder than it could be. You come into this thread, whining that other people don't share your beliefs in magical pseudo-science. I wouldn't have said what I said if you'd posted "Well I disagree. I believe that the Law of Attraction is a healthy lifestyle", but instead, you posted something more like "Well I disagree, and I additionally think you're being very rude by not believing in what I believe". You ask that if other people do not share your beliefs, they keep it to themselves, which is very weak-minded. If you are truly confident in what you believe in, you should be able to listen to people challenge your beliefs, and defend what you believe in. If you can't, well you should seriously question those beliefs, or at least be the one to leave. No one's hating here, we're just discussing different viewpoints.

Re-read this thread, and you'll see that you were the first person to use an ad-hominem argument. Before you came, everyone was discussing an idea, then you came into the picture and made the argument about a person (complaining that we had the audacity to think of the Law of Attraction as being silly, and that you were personally offended by that).

 

You may be right in your stand which is not totally wrong but there are people exists who claim they have psychic powers and helping people, It is true that they are not 100 percent correct but we need to take a look at the results once.

 

I think we should just be open with possibilities. I am not saying to believe every single thing that people propose, but I am saying that we should also not say that they are not true or possible. People may not have enough evidences to support those things, but people who contradict it also do not have enough evidences to support their idea that those are impossible.

Humans once thought that the Earth is the center of the solar system. Experts once declared that atoms are the smallest particles of a matter until they also opened it and found other crap inside. And nobody believed the Wright brothers that airplanes are possible, not even scientists or their own father. And look where we are now. Sometimes, things we see as "impossible" are just thing we do not have the capacity to understand yet.

 

People in ancient times didn't have a reliable method to tell myth from fact. We do have such a method now, and that's why it's not arrogant to declare many things (ESP, perpetual motion, homeopathy, astrology, etc.) as not only impossible but an insult to human intelligence.

For more details:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Law_of_attraction