This past Sunday, John Oliver tackled psychics. Obviously I am not a believer in psychics, but I will usually speak out against people going to them because in general they are grief vampires. You hear so many stories about a medium charging insane amounts of money to connect with some grieving person’s loved one. It pisses me off.
There was a cool story about how a group of guerrilla skeptics exposed a medium for hot reading. It is a pretty long read, but definitely worth it. There have been other examples of psychics being caught hot reading. I remember one a few years ago where the medium had someone backstage searching out people on the internet who were in the audience (they bought tickets via an internet form). The psychic had an earpiece and the guy would tell him tons of information about a person. People would fall for it every time. I think it was a retired FBI agent who had to go in and figure out the setup and then take them down.
And for those of you who do not understand cold reading, there was a television show years ago that explained it best.
Yep, seventeen years ago South Park made fun of psychics by showing exactly how they do it. And yet people still fall for it (which was the point of the episode).
