Undisputed fake
It was proven. In her Priceline commercial she says she feels the presence of the Priceline Negotiator, but it turns out that he is still alive. Case closed.
share[deleted]
Plus she claims to only be 45 years old, which cannot possibly be true.
shareShe claims to be 45? LOL!!!!
Religion: A crutch for those unable to accept reality.
Why do you think she can't possibly be only 45? From several sources I've found she's listed as still 44. She looks just like a woman in her mid-40s with too much of a tan and too much bleach on her hair. Her high school photo was a very 80s (for some people) photo. It was not a 70s photo. You can tell that not only by the hair, but by the background and other elements of the photo that it wasn't taken in the 70s.
This post just seems like one more of the "you're fat, ugly, and stupid" genre of posts whenever it involves women, even women unseen. I'm not even defending her show, but this type of posting gets so old and makes me wonder why anyone ever posts them. Do you all really not realize you will age and the best estimate of how you will look is your own parents or the older family member (i.e. aunt, uncle) you most resemble? No, I'm not pychic; i just know that genetics count for more than you realize when you're young. Also, she looks like a relatively real person albeit with maybe a little tune-up (i.e. some Botox).
- Sally
The perfect human being is uninteresting. - Joseph Campbell
Yeah, much better they should believe your bullsh$%, because you're such a great guy you'll call somebody a "cun%" who you don't even know.
No matter how important and serious you think you are, simply declaring what she does and says to be "bullsh$%" does not make it so.
Trust me, I use the c word very, very sparingly, and I didn't hesitate one second to use it here. It fits. And for goodness sakes, the whole "medium" thing has been debunked so many times it's not even funny. Wake up.
share 1. How does it "fit"?
2. You're only begging the question here (in the sense that term has always been used in describing a specific logical fallacy--petitio principii--not in the tragically altered sense it's picked up in the popular media). The unproven conclusion for your argument is that the "whole" medium thing has been debunked, but you're stating it here as a premise, with "whole" being the problematic condition.
What is not in question is that the field has many charlatans--obviously, this is provably true--and therefore one reasonable conclusion from that could be that since you know it has many, then it is probable that all of them are fakers. But that conclusion has to be seen as tentative or probable; it can't be said to have finality or certainty, because if _any_ of the remaining unexamined mediums turns out to be real, it destroys the conclusion.
In other words, at this stage, it comes down to belief against belief in the case of any specific medium who hasn't been proven conclusively to have been faking. You don't believe any medium could be real, because of what you know about fakery. Other people believe at least _some_ mediums could be real because of what they consider to be real evidence (although it's true that much of that "real evidence" probably amounts to carnival tricks and so forth, so many of the people in this group will be wrong at least some of the time). The _least_ reasonable position would be that _all_ mediums must be real, because it goes against more evidence than any other position. But the problem with the opposite extreme--"all mediums are fake"--is that all it really takes is one example or a small set of examples to the contrary to negate your position.
There is also the position a scientist would take, which is the simple burden-of-proof argument: You don't have to prove they're all fakes, because the burden of proof is on _them_ to prove any of them are real, and with any specific medium, the burden of proof is on her (or him) to prove she (or he) is real. It seems to me this show does what it can along these lines, but then, you'd be right to say it _is_ a TV show, and therefore that it would be no problem at all to fake it in the short term. It does occur to me, though, that she goes through an awful lot of people with an awful lot of specific information, some of which can be explained by systematic and intelligent guessing but much of which cannot, to have been on the air more than a few episodes without a thorough debunking at a level much more specific and damning than "all mediums are fake, so she must be a fake too."
In short, I agree there is much reason for skepticism of the field in general, but it seems to me you have to reach a much higher degree of certainty to justify calling this woman a "c---" (which I don't think a person should ever do, but I'll concede opinions differ on that, and I'll agree that if somebody is deliberately misleading people as to the fate or existence of their deceased loved ones, that's pretty high up on the c--- scale).
So let's cut right to the more direct question: Do you know of some sort of conclusive proof (not a mere claim somebody typed out on the Net) that Caputo is a fake?
OK, I get it. You're upset. Very, very upset. To start, if you have any connection to this Long Island fraud please disclose. Not appropriate to not do so if you're a friend, you get a cut of her theft, whatever.
As I said, all of these "mediums" all use the same techniques, and it's all been so thoroughly debunked. Why you wrote several paragraphs in response I don't know.
As for the "c" word, again be as offended as you want. I don't care. I just want to make it perfectly clear how much I despise people like this woman who pimp fraud.
You're projecting emotion onto me, possibly because that's how you conduct reasoning and argument. You couldn't be farther from the truth. I am not the least bit upset, particularly not by the opinion of somebody I don't even know, in a case where what you say one way or the other doesn't have a prayer of changing the actual truth about Theresa Caputo, whatever that actual truth is. What reason could there possibly be to be "upset"?
I have no connection whatsoever to her, of course, as I'm sure you actually know (but feel the need to accuse because you are so adamant about advancing your position and attacking anybody who doesn't agree).
_Many_ mediums use the same techniques. You don't know that all of them do. You assume so. Your belief controls what you assume.
As I said, if you are right--if she is a fraud, and knows she is one--then she deserves every bit of the disdain and negativity you're handing out. That is for sure.
Hmmm. No I'm not projecting. I deduced from your several paragraphs written about my use of the so-called C word you were upset. My deductive reasoning has always been one of my strengths, I guess it failed me here.
Don't know what else I can say to you, I've accepted the debunking of "mediums" such as this one. When people die, they die. That's it. When someone dies, ultimately all of their friends, loved ones, etc. have to accept that that person is dead and they will never communicate with them again. This latest "medium" is doing what all other "mediums" do, preying on people who haven't reached the "acceptance" part of denial, anger, acceptance.
Here's what I'm saying: Listen to the finality of presupposition in statements like "When people die, they die, and friends, etc., will never communicate with them again." When that is the certain starting point--and I'm not saying it's not your right to have it--there really is no honest inquiry beyond that point.
Also, "acceptance" doesn't have to include the idea of no further contact, no afterlife, etc. It hasn't meant that for literally billions of people, actually. Now, they could be wrong, and you could be right, of course. I'm just saying it's not necessarily so merely because this is your belief.
Look, again it's simple. This fraud uses the same techniques as other so-called mediums, all of which have been thoroughly debunked over and over and over and over. She is preying on weak people.
Using your logic, we shouldn't judge the murderer. After all, while it's quite likely that a gruesome death is a bad thing, we really shouldn't make such a blanket statement condemning murder. After all, there's a slight chance that gruesome death is a good thing. It's not necessarily so (your words) that gruesome death is bad.
I didn't major in Philosophy or any other "soft" science, sorry.
Also, re the "c" word--it's not that I'm offended (although I do think it's not such a good word to apply to anybody), it's that I don't think it's properly applied to a person like Caputo, absent proof that she is knowingly faking what she does (as distinct from what is currently true as far as we know, which is simply that the validity of what she does has not been conclusively established).
sharere using "c" word. As Louie C.K. says, use the damn word. Using "c" word just makes every who reads it say c^nt in their head. How is it fair that you don't want to use it but you thrust the use on someone else. (He used "n" word, but same principal applies). If you don't like the word, say you don't like the word c^nt, but using "c" word as a cop out is just messed up.
And no one can do what she is doing to the extent she is without actively attempting to deceive. If she truly believed then at best she would be an idiot and wouldn't have gotten as successful as she has. Kind of hard to accidentally cold read somebody. That is the evidence I have that she is doing it on purpose.
Wax poetical and philosophical all you want about who can prove what and where the burden of proof lies, god knows I get enough of that at work, but you cannot talk to the dead. Any argument of proving this or that is crap because one of the basis of why the scam works is people want to believe and the belief is powerful. If you believe that, fine. I concede that someone who truly believes that will not be convinced by an anonymous person on a message board, but she can't. I understand how you can want to believe and how it would be an amazing thing, but I am staying grounded in science and while it cannot be proven, as a lot of accepted scientific theories cannot (such as the theory of relativity) they are still accepted as pretty much true. It is pretty much true that she is a fake, liar, fraud and whatever other nasty word you can think of that does or doesn't start with a "c".
That Louis CK routine is absolutely hysterical (as is most of his stuff, IMHO).
What is your evidence that she has cold read, though? You are locked into circular reasoning and (I think) don't even see it. And further, you are starting from a presupposition that it is not possible, which makes any attempt at honest inquiry into the question completely impossible.
I don't "want to believe" anything. I'm saying that much of what is being said on this thread is fundamental irrationality of the self-enclosed-loop variety.
You're not applying skepticism properly.
The question isn't "can you prove she's fake?" She is the one making extraordinary claims, and she needs to supply the evidence to prove she is telling the truth. Starring in an edited weekly TV show is hardly enough.
From everything I've seen, she is simply using the same techniques that all mediums use. Cold reading. She asks questions and gathers information, all the while making it seem like she somehow knew the things that her reads happily tell her about themselves. And in the process, she makes people feel connected to their dead loved ones again. It's psychological manipulation.
Here is a guy that uses the same techniques, but admits it's fake. He is easily as successful as the LIM. It might give you some insight into the process.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7XIf-z1J4w
I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness.
[deleted]
Actually, I'm applying skepticism exactly properly, and here's why.
1. I agree the question isn't "can you prove she's fake?", and I never said so. In fact, I said the opposite, when I outlined the scientific view, which is that so far, the most you can say is that what she does stands in the category of unproven assertion. Lack of proof is not the same thing as certain proof of falsehood, in other words. I do agree that the burden of proof should be on mediums when it comes to this sort of scientific argument, along the lines of the talking-horse principle. (If you say you have a talking horse, it's on you to prove it, and the bar is going to be pretty high.) I think you're confusing 1) my insistence that she not be called a "c--t" and that any specific medium cannot definitively be said to be a fake without specific proof, with 2) the idea that I'm saying that what's she's doing _must_ be considered valid because it hasn't been disproven. I am not saying the latter, and I am saying that proof would require controlled conditions far beyond something like a TV show.
2. Re cold reading: I'm familiar with it too, and I agree that it explains at least a very large amount of what purported mediums do. I am not convinced that this is true in every single case, nor is a broad assertion that this must be true in Caputo's case without a scientifically rigorous and valid comparison of specifics. It's true that _some_ of what Caputo does could be said to be potentially in the category of cold reading. For instance, when a young person seeks you out and you've established that it was a brother or husband who died, it's not such a hard call to say that this probably happened "unexpectedly," because of the broad interpretation of that word (even a long-term cancer is "unexpected" in the sense that young people generally don't die). Other questions like "did he laugh a lot?" and "do you still have some of her clothes in your house?" obviously are going to have a high probability of being true. Even beyond that, I agree that skillful cold readers can use discriminating questions to get down to amazingly specific information in only a very few steps, for sure.
It's also true that there is a huge difference (to me, at least) in the group session versus the individual session. If I'm in a group session and start asking for "J" names, well, you know (although I haven't seen her at that obvious level of trickery). But if the show is accurately depicting what happens in individual sessions, that seems to me considerably more remarkable and robust.
At any rate, I have seen cold reading demonstrations and have read a bit on the subject. But some of what Caputo does seems to me either impossible or highly improbable through cold reading, although of course it could be possible through simple TV fakery--which I guess points to the fundamental difficulty of making and broadcasting any of these kinds of shows (LIM, Ghost Hunters, etc.). You almost have to remove that question from consideration, because it becomes a simple matter of "are they faking it for TV or aren't they?", which is different from "are any mediums anywhere real", "is there an afterlife in which people continue to live with individual identity," etc., kinds of questions. At best, watching these shows is always going to be a matter of saying "if they didn't fake it, that was amazing." I mean, any rational person has to have at least that much reserve about it.
But anyhow...I guess it comes down to a judgment as to whether 1) at least some of the specifics Caputo comes out with are not likely to be reachable by cold reading, and 2) whether what happens in these sessions is represented accurately by the TV show.
I do doubt that any amateur is going to be able to make a judgment about whether everything Caputo does is explicable by cold reading. And even if it were possible to establish that every single thing she says is reachable by cold reading, that still doesn't establish that she _is_ cold reading. I may deduce accurately, by various marketing means, that you are 38 years old, married, with two kids and a sedan, and somebody else may arrive at the same information by real psychic powers; but the fact that we arrived at the same information doesn't guarantee the same kind of method.
So, to get further into this investigation of potential validity, you'd have to have somebody seeing some predetermined number of complete and unedited sessions--better yet, with individuals and not groups, I think--and that observation would have to include an examination of method as well as conclusions, to know whether you have something or you still have no proof of paranormal powers, or whatever. I wonder, do you know, or does anybody here know, whether there is such an unedited video of Caputo doing her thing? Or rather, more than one (because you can disprove anything with a small enough sample--I'll bet even Caputo doesn't claim 100% success in every individual instance, on the spot)? I was going to say that it is a little bit frustrating when people like this don't set up some kind of really robust test of ability, because you can imagine what that would do to the ratings for the show, if she is real and if the test were successful. (You'd be right to point out the opposite, too--what it would do to ratings if the test were a failure.) But maybe she's done something that approximates this, I don't know.
Anyhow, it's all interesting, but my point is that calling somebody a "c--t" requires a level of certainty that is not possible with mere lack of proof, rather than definitive proof of falsehood and fakery.
[deleted]
Thanks for your attempt to control, but actually there have been replies already. If you don't want to read it, speak for yourself. It's pretty easy to see how long it is at a glance. I'm sure it represents no more than a page or two of actual script. If that's too much for you, fine.
shareBtw, she's a c^nt. Until a psychic (and before I get a huge post about psychic v. medium not being the same thing, i know they are not the same thing, besides both being fakes) wins the lotto she remains a liar, thief, cheat and a crook. You cannot talk to the dead.
Anyone who takes advantage of grief stricken individuals for their own gain through lies and deceit is a c^nt. End of story.
[deleted]
But some of what Caputo does seems to me either impossible or highly improbable through cold reading
That seems to be your central argument. You have doubts, therefore she might be true.
Sure, she is impressive, and that's why she has a TV show and makes what is surely millions. But again, she uses the same techniques that mediums have been using for centuries. The same questions, and the same psychological tricks. She asks her audience for information, and pretends she knows the answers they supply the whole time. There is nothing new about her methods.
I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness.
But merely because it can be read that way by an amateur evaluator (you) doesn't mean that's what it _is_. I mean, we've gotten used to this Internet thing where just because a thing can be spoken of in a certain way, it "is" or "might be" that way.
What I'm saying is simply this: You observe what she does. She gives a set of answer ranging from the fairly predictable to the really specific and seemingly unpredictable. You're saying that 100% of that is explicable through these non-paranormal techniques, but that in itself is an assertion that needs proof. In my judgment, at least some of these things probably are not accountable for in terms of those techniques, which opens the question as to whether any of them are, in her case. Again, just because Person A and Person B reach seven of the same 10 conclusions, it doesn't mean they got there in the same way.
You're also not (at least I think you're not) accounting for what happens in individual sessions, where it seems to me the carnival-type techniques are much harder to pull off. There is always the possibility of TV fakery, of course--but again, I'm just factoring out that variable for the purpose of addressing this separate question.
Tell you what: Can you point to an entire sequence of her involvement with a specific client, preferably individual (but I'll take it in a group setting), where all the questions and answers are explainable by these techniques?
My problem with your argument is that it is so generalized and broad that it smacks of an ideological commitment--"all mediums are fakes"--and then a retroactive construction of an evaluative system that supports that notion, rather than starting strictly from the evidence and moving upward. It's Aristotelean, in other words, not Baconian.
But merely because it can be read that way by an amateur evaluator (you) doesn't mean that's what it _is_.
Would an expert's opinion be valid enough for you?
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/04/opinion_randilimedium0409/
James Randi has spent an entire career debunking psychics, mediums, and other "supernatural" frauds. He's awesome. He has an ongoing 1 million dollar challenge to ANY psychic or medium to come and prove their worth in a controlled environment. No won has won since it started 1964.
Why has no one won? Because the people who call themselves "mediums", all of them, all the people who charge the bereaved to talk to their dead loved ones, are fakes. They ALL use cold reading. Caputo is just another charlatan.
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
[deleted]
I don't really give a sh$% what kind of person I strike you as. Clear enough? Any big words in there?
As for you, you strike me as the kind of person who thinks just because you declare a person "pwnd," it must be true. That speaks for itself.
To me he/she comes off as a garden variety philosopher. I remember the one philosophy class I took in college, the courdoroy jacket-with-patches-wearing PhD in Philosophy droned on and on and on about "do we really exist?" and other pressing issues of the day. I had more important matters to deal with, like acquiring marketable skills, and found the whole exercise a giant waste of time. But anyway, such people buried in the "soft" sciences seem to take delight in questioning simple matters that are dispensed with efficiently and effectively by the productive class (read: those who do the heavy lifting of being gainfully employed in the private sector and paying the bills of those who have declared themselves entitled to pursue a degree in "human studies" on someone else's nickel).
[deleted]
Mitt Romney's a Libertarian? News to me.
share[deleted]
Wow, being an adult is hip? Cool!
share[deleted]
Got it, one grows up only when one accepts his obligation to pay the freight for those who decide to pursue education in the "soft sciences", like our favorite philosopher king/queen here who writes multi-paragraph diatribes about how we must accept the premise that a Long Island housewife can speak to the dead.
Heard it all before.
"Would an expert's opinion be valid enough for you?"
Depends. Randi is on the strong side, I agree. And certainly it's more convincing than a "just because I said so" argument on a comment board. As with many debunkers, I actually agree with a lot of what he says, and I agree there are a lot of fakes out there. I also appreciate his work in exposing a lot of real silliness and stupidity.
But the question here is whether the existence of fakes--even a lot of them, even if most mediums are fakes, even if nearly all are, even if all of them in the world other than one or two are fakes--proves the impossibility of _any_ single medium's validity. I think you can see where this is a logical impossibility.
As for the million-dollar challenege, the critical thing with Randi--I'm sure you know this--is that the test conditions have to be agreed to mutually. Anybody who understands this sort of thing at all can see where this can be the absolute end of the process (at either end, frankly). There is also the problem of whether there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea of demanding scientific testability in such a situation. If psychic phenomena exist, it may be entirely wrong to conceive of them as being testable with the same kinds of elements--repeatability, interrater reliability, internal and external validity, etc.--that you would have in a natural science.
At any rate, if he tested the top five alleged psychics in the world today and all five turned out not to pass the test, and even if the test could be shown to have been absolutely fair and appropriate to the task, then you would know something about five psychics, not all psychics in the entire world. You could say that the test makes it more likely that any other psychic or medium similarly tested also would not pass, but you couldn't say it with certainty.
This is why you are wrong, of course (no matter how many other commenters chime in to claim "pwning"), to say that the sole reason nobody has won the million-dollar challenge is that "all" mediums are fakes and that "all" use cold reading. That presumes equal opportunity to take the challenge, and for that matter equal knowledge of the challenge, for all people everywhere claiming to be mediums. In fact, some time back Randi stopped making this offer to just anybody anywhere, which you may know.
In this way, the people who are completely convinced that all medium "readings" are the "cold readings" of charlatans may be guilty of backward reasoning themselves. If there is a "hit" that seems not explicable by any other means, call it a "cold reading hit," even if you can't explain the specific mechanism by which the medium got there.
I would be much more interested in somebody doing exactly what I said before--seeing an unedited video of a one-on-one session with Caputo, and explaining the statistical likelihood of reaching items X, Y, and Z when starting with only the given info. At the end of that examination, you would have something much more "scientific," if that is the right term. You would not have broad conclusions about all mediums in the world; you would have an assessment of the probability that Caputo could have known X, Y, and Z with no more information than she started with. Do that with five sessions, and you might know something. I'd be interested
Beyond that, this really is a presuppositional argument. I think there is enough strong evidence to support the idea that there may be something to this stuff at least some of the time. There is also abundant evidence that much of it, probably most of it, maybe even almost all of it, is fakery or wishful thinking. (The "may be" in "there may be something to this stuff at least some of the time" also indicates that I am willing to accept the possibility that literally _none_ of it is true--but not to assume so on presupposition.) You, on the other hand, presume that absolutely none of it can possibly be true. It would be a more reasonable position to say that it remains unproven until it's proven, and that the presumption should be that as long as it's unproven, it's not relevant. Or, you could say that it's outside the realm of real scientific inquiry, and therefore, as a naturalist, it's not relevant to you. But to hold so tightly to the presumption that all of it must be false because of your own presupposition is to be as prejudgmental as any true believer or fundamentalist (see the message farther down in this thread, where "Orgasmatronics"--no, really--says simply, "Since people can't talk to the dead, there was no chance of her NOT being a fraud to begin with," which is self-evidently presuppositional).
I'm not saying it's not your right to hold that position; I'm just saying it's fundamentally presuppositional, and therefore should not be given the sheen of a reasoned position.
If psychic phenomena exist, it may be entirely wrong to conceive of them as being testable with the same kinds of elements--repeatability, interrater reliability, internal and external validity, etc.--that you would have in a natural science.
You just outed yourself.
Science is all we have. It is THE working model of thought and rationality for the universe we live in. Once you say, oh, this is outside of science, you open the door for every absurd pseudoscience that comes down the pike- creationism, astrology, flat earth, ghosts, witches, esp, seances, ALL of it.
I'm sorry, but your posts are so condescending and pedantic, and underneath it all, you really have no idea how science works. You don't think critically. You aren't a skeptic.
Get this book.
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/03454 09469
Or, if that's too much work, just watch this video.
http://youtu.be/eUB4j0n2UDU
I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness.
Actually, it is _you_ who have "outed yourself," here:
>> Science is all we have. <<
That is an unprovable assertion, a presupposition that you decide either to start from, or not to start from. Not to mention the fact that the tools of "science," as defined by people who know what they're talking about (that is, when "science" doesn't become a glurge term, poorly defined, for "everything there is, ever has been, or ever will be"), don't apply even to every observable phenomenon. Take evolution, for instance. It's true that evolutionary theory is _partly_ a matter of science, but it's also partly a matter of phenomenal history. It is mostly not testable, not replicable, not subject to interrater reliability, etc. And yet, it has been established as true, or true enough pending further evidence, for most people (including me). That is how rational people state such conclusions. Just about every conclusion is tentatively true, including whether there is such a thing as an afterlife or a true medium.
Also, you are posing a false dichotomy in which either somebody buys your all-encompassing view of "science," or, as the hellish alternative, we all descend into utter irrationality in which there is no basis for evaluating any observable phenomenon, any event in the past, etc. What you're really doing is conflating the idea of "science" with rationality at large, and if you understood rationality, you would understand that everything I've said is true. It is rational to say that what Caputo does has not been proven to be true. It is not rational to say that you know it is false, or that you know all mediums everywhere must be fakes. You can proceed with the idea that that assertion is _probably_ true, and I think it's possible to make a pretty strong case for that. Any scientist worth a damn would tell you the same thing, if he's speaking scientifically and not letting personal belief get in the way. But presuppositional belief as a substitute for observation and testing is no better when it's done by somebody like you than it is when it's done by a religious fundamentalist or a crackpot carnival medium.
As for your insults about being condescending and pedantic, not having any idea how science works, not thinking critically, not being a skeptic, etc., you really have no idea what you're talking about, and you're out of your league. For one thing, there are many rational scientists who will tell you exactly what I'm telling you -- that "science," defined specifically, doesn't pretend to be able to be able to describe every single phenomenon for the entire history, present, and future of the universe. What it does do is to aspire to describe how the physical world works, how it probably will work in the future, and -- if you want to extend the definition a bit, and it is an extension -- how it has worked in the past, with all assertions about the past and future based on present workings, pending evidence to the contrary, and always with somewhat uncertain conclusions because basically any assertion made about the past or future is untestable. If you don't know that, and apparently you don't, that's your fault. Calling somebody else "pedantic" or an "uncritical thinker" doesn't save you.
As for being a "skeptic," if you knew what you were talking about for one second, you wouldn't even have brought that up. Being an extreme or absolute skeptic is fundamentally _anti_-scientific, in that it prefers the extreme Aristotelean over the Baconian, which is to say that it involves making assertions of certainty where experience and testing have not established certainty -- which is precisely what is going on with this thread. Absolute skepticism ends with the inability to reach or act on any conclusion of a non-negational nature, and therefore cannot be scientific. You can't know, for instance, with absolute certainty whether combining chemicals X and Y a hundred years from now will produce the same Z result you have now; you just know there is a high degree of probability that it will. Absolute skepticism keeps you from establishing even _that_ much. But reasonable skepticism -- for example, "What Caputo does has not been conclusively established as being true" -- is a good thing. I am, in fact, a reasonable skeptic.
Insult people all you want. Question their reading ability, when most probably they (certainly I) have read far more on the subject than you ever have. (I read _Demon-Haunted World_ when it came out, and had read 20 books just like it before it was ever published. That's just for starters.) And then you call somebody _else_ "condescending"? P!ss off with that garbage. You haven't won any arguments; you've only restated your assumptions and insisted that somebody else who doesn't agree is unscientific, when you don't even understand the definition and limitations of "science."
You must have used the phrase "Aristotelian vs Baconian" 20 times in this thread. We get it- you are the IMDb king of philosophy.
Caputo is a cold reader. That much is observable by anyone, and certainly by someone as clever as you claim to be. She uses the same methods that "mediums" have been using for the last century. This isn't really in question, if you are indeed so knowledgeable in the language of science. It's Occam's razor. Could someone who uses the same techniques that have been debunked for a century really be the first one to use THAT method to actually talk to the dead?
But I will give you your ONLY point here, over and over. Could someone, somewhere, at some time, possibly talk to the dead? Of course I cannot say no to that. I think it's highly improbable, to the point of impossible, but I cannot say no.
But by observing the "mediums" that do exist, and using the tools that skeptical thinking allows us, coming to the conclusion that they all so far have used cold reading, is hardly some wild, unreasonable jump.
Yet it's one you argue against over and over in your condescending, pedantic tone.
Because yes, good lord, you are pedantic.
(Incidentally, holding forth about your bona fides in philosophy on a internet chat board is the height of pretension.)
I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness.
[deleted]
"Pwnd."
Ooo, look. You know an Internet word. Good for you.
Like I care what you think about who's "pwnd" and who's not. If you have anything of substance to say, say it. Otherwise you're just a twit.
[deleted]
"Looks like I struck a nerve!"
Well, then, have a congratulatory circle-jerk with somebody, if you want, for your imaginary nerve-striking.
I mean, whatever you want to tell yourself, I guess.
[deleted]
"You must have used the phrase "Aristotelian vs Baconian" 20 times in this thread. We get it..."
Well...no. You don't. Because you keep advancing a false and insupportable version of the "A" (we already know what can and can't happen with perfect certainty) with no regard whatsoever for the "B" (phenomena must be accounted for in any system that calls itself "rational," or more narrowly, "scientific," and sometimes a phenomenon appears that cannot be accounted for with established principle or rule). Now: If you have something better than the two terms that offend you, and into which you read so much of what you presume must be my intent to be "king of philosophy on IMDB," or whatever, you just feel free to slap 'em down here so I can use them instead, and so you'll stop reading motive into every goddamned thing. Until then, they're on-point to what we're talking about. And calling somebody "condescending," or whatever, for using on-point terms on an internet chat board is the height of knowing you have lost at least part of your argument and are just looking for ad hominem so you can land a blow. I mean, as long as we're reading motive and intent into things.
You seem like a relatively verbal and intelligent person. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that if were inclined to waste time in this way, I might be able to find other instances where, because you are not used to losing an argument, or even being met with somebody who has a brain, you get pouty and start calling the other guy "pedantic" and "condescending," rather than answering the substance of the point. There really isn't a dime's worth of difference between my tone and yours, my vocabulary and yours, my syntax and yours, and the truth is, you came at me ad hominem when I did nothing similar to you. And yet, you seem obsessed with calling me a condescending pedant, or whatever. I would've thought you were up to the task of an intelligent debate on the actual subject. Too bad.
"(Incidentally, holding forth about your bona fides in philosophy on a internet chat board is the height of pretension.)"
Actually, "pretension" would include something like your previous suggestion-slash-insult that I should "get this book" (Demon-Haunted World) unless it's "too much work" (because apparently you read these things, or any things, and I don't), in which case I should just watch the video (either the book or the video for us less intelligent folks would have substituted for convincing argument on your part, I guess). So, having been thus sideways insulted, when I tell you I've read not only that one but many more like it, you come back saying I'm being "pretentious" by "holding forth about bona fides." YOU were the one that brought it up, of course.
So, apparently, you think you can insult somebody regarding either their willingness or ability to read, but then when the person responds to that, you try a second volley about "holding forth about bona fides." I guess you're proud of this sort of thing. I can't tell.
As for Occam's razor, it doesn't apply here, because you are moving backward from your conclusion (that there is no such thing as a real medium, or really communicating with the departed) that Caputo must be using cold reading techniques, without your enumerating a single example, and then running to the Occam's construct as if it proved anything or applied here. It doesn't. When there is no way to address process or methodology, and all you have is a result, then it would apply. That is not the case here. We are able to observe what she does and evaluate the method. We don't have to presume anything from the conclusions backward.
Now: As I've said before, some of what she does looks like it _could_ be cold reading, although even that conclusion is not certain (and it can't be, for reasons I've already gone into but can go into again). But some of what she does looks to me like it is _not_ cold reading, with the constant caveat that anything you see on TV can be faked or fudged. But factoring that out for the moment, she does at least some things that no cold reader I've ever seen or heard of can do, particularly in individual sessions.
The real irony of this whole thing is that I absolutely guarantee you that I am not far from your position. I do think there is some possibility that what she does is real, even though there are many, many fakes all over the place, although it's probably true that I would place the degree of possibility a little higher than you would, but not to the point where I think anybody could say it's "probably true," which is how just about every ideologue on this thread has misread it.
Aside from that, I just really hate bad reasoning, and that's what I was going after -- and why so many people were ready to jump down my throat about it, because I wasn't, and am not, going to grant the initial unstated presumption behind the whole "Caputo is a c--t for faking it and doing this to people" assertion. The whole thing started with dkgambler's "c--t" statement (second post in the thread). My point was, and still is, that for you to say something like that about somebody, you need to be certain. Really certain.
Do you think that's not true? Would you advocate calling somebody a "c--t" because she's "probably" doing something really bad?
Then, after that, it was one whack after another from people who were blind to their own initially assumed fact that's not really an established fact -- that there cannot possibly be such a thing as a real medium; that because there is such a thing as cold reading, Caputo must be doing it too (because not one person has offered specific examples -- it's all just an assumption that she _must_ be doing it); and so on.
I guess people thought I should say something like this: "Oh, okay. I didn't know you were so completely certain that no medium anywhere could ever be doing real things, and that's how you know Caputo is a fake and a c--t. I see now."
Sorry.
What's more, the entire time I have never said for one second that I'm certain what Caputo and others do must be real. But people are so locked into their own agendas, so blind to their own presuppositions, and so used to flaming away on the Internet without knowing what the f@#$ they're talking about (with little "pwnd" twitlanguage, just to show how Net-groovy they really are), that none of that mattered.
At any rate: It seems to me the entire difference (relative to the specific argument about Caputo and this show) is that you think it's improbable to the point of being nearly impossible, and I think it's improbably but a little less extremely so.
I also think something like this is not entirely within the realm of science as narrowly (and I think properly) defined, which is not to say that it's not a phenomenon that can be investigated rationally and tested to some extent. You may disagree. I'm probably not going to convince you.
I will say that it seems to me much more analogous to a "social science" than to anything that fits within something that could always be reasonably expected to be observable with scientific method. If there is such a thing as life after death, and at least a few mediums are real, and they're talking to people on the "other side" with individual identities and wills, then how would you set up an "experiment" for a medium in which a negative result would prove anything with finality? This is why I think it's more like some hybrid of social science and historical phenomenon (did it or didn't it really happen?). I realize that authors of books like The Demon-Haunted World disagree, but that's observably because they start from a presumption of certainty -- either that there is absolutely no such thing as the realm of the spiritual, or that nothing can be "real" unless it's establishable by science; or, more honestly, that they have chosen consciously to live their lives and think their thoughts as materialists to whom nothing matters outside whatever they think established physical laws and order are (I would say that makes them extreme Aristoteleans, but...you know).
I called you pedantic because you subject your readers to extremely long-winded posts, ones that are chock full of minute, unimportant details, all simply because you obviously love to hear yourself talk.
Like the one I'm responding to. Try brevity. Seriously. It'll do you wonders.
At any rate: It seems to me the entire difference (relative to the specific argument about Caputo and this show) is that you think it's improbable to the point of being nearly impossible, and I think it's improbably but a little less extremely so.
No. You misunderstand me. Caputo is a cold reader. Period. She doesn't MAYBE talk to the dead. She does NOT talk to the dead.
But again, as your only real thrust about this seems to be, given the possibility of the infinite, could SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, possibly do something incredible and find a way to communicate to people who have died? It would take so many things that we currently understand to be true about reality to turn on their heads, but I will give you the point that I cannot say no.
But it's not this woman.
The rest of your lengthy screed can be boiled down to this: you don't think Caputo is a cold reader because...it just doesn't FEEL like she is. Science be damned!
(And though I don't necessarily like the C-word, preying on the bereaved for profit is utterly reprehensible, and she deserves the criticism she gets.)
I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness.
[deleted]
What an insufferable prick you are. And yet, I'm going to try one more time. No, I don't know why.
First of all, I don't "subject my readers" to anything. Anybody who sees the post can tell instantly that it's longer than the average, and if they're not interested, nobody's holding a gun to their heads. Or is that not true at your house?
Secondly, I happen to have written for publication for some time. Maybe you have too. That's not the point. I've been paid for writing for quite a few years. And you think I'm worried what you think about whether what I write is too long, too pedantic, whatever? Are you kidding? I'm covering what needs to be covered. High-school students of average to below-average intelligence complain about "length." Smart people complain about whether something is off-point and unnecessary. What am I saying that's off-point?
Third: "Pedantic" has nothing to do with length. If you think I've brought up irrelevant details, feel free to point those out. You can do so in the same post in which you finally give specifics on how everything Caputo has done on camera has been cold reading. We are now on at least--what, the third or fourth page of posts on this thread?--and neither you nor anybody else has provided examples. You satisfy yourself with declaring it to be true. It's your right to do so, of course, but don't pretend to be rational or a "scientific" thinker if you do so.
In addition: You have no answer for the misapplication of Occam's razor or any of several other substantive matters I brought up in response to what you said. This is further evidence that you have no intention whatsoever to engage in an actual rational debate on the matter. You want to declare that what you say is true, and if you are challenged--especially at length and in detail, because as we've seen in the recent presidential debate, you can lie in no more time than it takes to state the lie, but refuting takes much more time and detail--then you dismiss it by calling the other person "pedantic," again without a single example. (Go ahead. I think you know I can prove the relevance of any single thing you bring up from the previous post.)
No, I'm not saying you're "lying," at least not mostly. I'm saying the same principle applies as in the presidential debate. You make a statement which, to address rationally, will take some length and detail, and then you complain about length and detail. The alternative is to engage in the usual worthless Internet "discussion," which really is no more than just a series of recited positions that gets nobody anywhere. And the reason this length and detail irritate you is that really, you want to pretend you're coming from an intellectual place, and maybe you actually think you are, but at heart you just want to state your position and have that end the question.
On top of that, you misstate my position and make a straw man out of it. I have said not one damn thing about "feeling" that Caputo is not a cold reader. I said that much of what she says _might_ be attributable to cold reading, maybe even most of what she says; but there are typically at least a few items in every session that I have never seen a cold reader do.
If I thought it mattered to you at all, I could give you examples. But it doesn't matter to you. You want the pretense of objectivity and scientism, but in fact you have your ideological commitment that leads in exactly the opposite of true science, the first principle of which is that things accurately observed deserve an explanation if you can get one. You have got the cart before the horse, letting your "explanation," such as it is, determine what your observation is. You believe she is a cold reader, but only because of backward summative reasoning that in fact is false reasoning. Because it is possible to examine what she actually does methodologically and to compare it with what other cold readers do, and you won't do it in specific terms, what you are doing is fundamentally lazy and irrational.
I also have not said anything remotely comparable to "science be damned," but I'll bet you know that. I have tried to make a distinction between wider rational discussion of phenomenology and a narrower definition of "science," as many serious intellectuals and scientists have. Either you're too ignorant to know that this is true (I doubt it), or you do know it and you're just posturing for whomever you think your audience is here (maybe the guy who thinks you "pwnd" me, or somebody else in middle school somewhere, sporting a laptop and a Bieber sweep). But instead, you just make some simplistic gag line out of it ("science be damned") and exit the discussion. You have no intention whatsoever of actually discussing anything. You want to declare your position and avoid having it challenged, and the way you avoid it is to raise issues and then insult anyone who tries to answer them. Which makes you just another dime-a-dozen Internet flamer, if a bit more intelligent than the average flamer and able to feign interest in rationality and science while actually knowing little about it and refusing to engage in an actual debate over it. Talk about pretentious.
So, for anybody else who's actually reading this thread:
I can't prove this specifically, but I do think it's probably true that most, or even nearly all, mediums and accounts of paranormal activity are false.
I also understand (as I'm sure you do) what the talking-horse standard is, and I would agree that it would apply to what is alleged as evidence of the paranormal (and for that very reason, if there is such a thing as the paranormal, it may not be provable).
I also understand, as you do, that absence of evidence to the contrary is not the same thing as proof of the assertion.
It seems clear to me that much of what you see week-to-week on Caputo's show is inconclusive, even if rendered with complete accuracy and no trickery, and it is also true that a show like this would be easy to fake in any particular episode by editing out anything that isn't a "hit" (although the ability to sustain such a thing is more problematic, because nobody on the staff and nobody otherwise associated with the show could break ranks).
If you're honest, though, and if you know anything about the subject, you know cold reading has to do with chains of probability running from general to specific, along with on/off or if/then points of division, facial and vocal cues, etc. So if a medium has a young woman very upset in front of her, and she already knows the reason the woman came to her was to talk about a recent loss, it's not much of a leap to ask whether this was an unexpected or sudden loss. Most mediums who talk to the bereaved probably don't find it too hard to tell the difference between the expressions and body language of a woman in her 20s who has lost a parent, versus one who has lost a husband or child, which by definition would be "unexpected or sudden" a pretty fair percentage of the time.
Or, once it's established that it was a parent who died, the medium says something like, "I'm getting a sense that you have an item of clothes or a box of your mom's stuff in your house." Again, high-percentage. Or: "Do you have something on you right now that you wear to remember your child?" What are the odds that somebody going to see a medium, grieving over a loss that much, would do that? Pretty high. Of course.
But then you have Caputo doing stuff like this: She approaches a woman in an airport and says she's getting something about a young male. The woman tells her that her son died. Caputo says she's getting the number five. The woman says her child was five months old when he died, and it happened five years ago.
Now: If you know anything about cold reading, you know this is not typical. Usually, when you get the "number" thing, or something as general as "young male," you're in a group setting, and the odds are very strong that somebody there will have had a son, or a relatively young uncle or father, etc., who died recently. And "five"? Somebody in that room has five brothers and sisters, or five uncles and aunts. Or something happened five years ago; the person who died was married five years ago, or graduated high school, or whatever. Or it was "about" five years ago when cancer was diagnosed (but it was actually six, or four). Or there are five pets, or there are two fives in the address of the deceased's mother. Or whatever.
But when you come down to a specific person in a specific place, and the subject is specifically limited to a death of someone close to that person, and the first number out of your mouth turns out to be the exact monthwise age and the exact number of years ago that it happened, that is not typical of cold reading, and anybody who says it is just plain ignorant on the subject.
Of course, this could have been fudged by editing. It might have been the fourth number Caputo came up with, not the first. This is where you need conditional reasoning. So: Would you agree that if the facts are true as rendered in the video clip, it would be highly improbable that a cold reader would be able to walk up to one specific person and know that that person had lost a young male, and that "five" was significant in specific relationship to the only death under discussion and the specific death that is causing distress for that person?
If you think that is the kind of thing cold readers do--going straight to a specific fact, without any route for getting there or any paring down from general to specific, with the fact so specific that it clearly might not apply to just anyone (this is roughly comparable to the property of disconfirmability, without which no meaningful scientific or rational conclusion is possible)--then you really don't know much about it.
What you do see from cold readers, and I've seen quite a few demonstrations, is a definite general-to-specific deductive process that the subject isn't even aware of, usually with the feeling that it's far more specific than it really is. "Did your daughter love to laugh?" I mean, who doesn't, whenever they _do_ laugh? Who "hates to laugh"?
Or: "I feel that she was sometimes a very serious person, but she knew how to have fun, too." Yeah. Who isn't and doesn't? This kind of thing has the feeling of specificity where there really is none.
But how does Caputo know something about a photo with a "Hi, My Name Is" sticker on the person pictured, or know that the person's son won a competition earlier that day and got a medal for it, or know that the guy built the house they're sitting in*? Her typical starting points--again, if accurately depicted and not excessively altered by editing--just aren't where most cold readers' starting points are
(*I would agree that when a medium is at somebody else's house, this is an absolute bonanza for some kinds of clues--which is why I think Caputo's individual sessions at her own house cut way down on the possibilities for cold reading in two way: they're not group sessions, and she's not in somebody else's place, surrounded by clues.)
It is true that she often says things that could be generally applied--"your father loved you and loved doing things with you, didn't he?", or "your brother could be moody sometimes"--but to say this is conclusive evidence of cold reading is to misunderstand the idea of specificity. That is, she _could_ be cold reading on these items, fishing for more specific info; but, taking into account for argument's sake the possibility that people exist "on the other side" and sometimes reveal things about themselves to a "medium" (and you have to do this as a null hypothesis to your own theory, don't you?), it's also possible that she is simply perceiving aspects of the actual people because those people (the deceased or "crossed over," I mean) actually are revealing those things to her. If I say your brother is a real douche sometimes, I could be just faking it, but I could know he's a real douche because I actually know it, because I've seen it, whatever. You can't tell how I came about the information merely from the fact that I stated it. Same for me knowing the score of a football gamebecause I saw it on TV, while you know it because you were actually at the game. Simply, it is possible to know the same information by different means. Even if you replicate some of these facts with a cold reader, it doesn't prove that the medium reached her conclusions through cold reading. It can suggest it, and that suggestion gets closer to certainty if you can prove similar methodology rather than only similar result. But it's irrational to say that a similar conclusion _must_ have been arrived at by the same method.
But this is what much of your argument boils down to: Because the result is the same, the cause must be the same, even though there are quite obviously multiple possible causes.
So how, for instance, would Caputo know that the death of a young woman's father was a "murder of some kind" that involved being pressed down on by something really heavy, and it turns out the guy was a 9/11 victim? Again, discounting for the moment the possibility of complete TV fakery, prior research, etc., how would that happen from cold reading, with no route to get there, no previous general statements to parse and divide and figure out a route to get to the right info? This is not "you and your father were very close, weren't you?" (of course, or why would she be paying the money to be there?), or "his death was very tragic and things have never been the same." This is "your father is telling me his death was a kind of crime, and he's under something big," or whatever she said.
And also: "There's something about a ring, too." Now, there's always "something about a ring," isn't there? So it would be a nothing-burger if the answer were something like, "Oh, yeah, my dad loved his wedding ring." Or: "Yeah, I made him a ring when I was eight years old." Nothing related to the death itself; just something, sometime, about a ring, anytime in his life.
But that's not how it went. In that episode, the deal on the ring was this: The last day of his life, this father left his ring at home. Unprecedented. Never did it before that day, as far as the daughter knew. That day, she pointed it out to him when they were in the car, says they need to go back. He says it's OK, he doesn't need it that day. And in a couple of hours, he's gone--but the family now has the ring.
If you can't see the difference between this kind of thing that relates specifically and directly to the death, and just "something sometime about a ring, whatever story the family can come up with," you don't know cold reading.
(Another thing extremist skeptics do right about now to put their finger on the scale is to come up with anecdotal examples in which a cold reader guessed exactly right on something like this. Sorry, doesn't cut it. If you take one session out of five hundred for some amazingly coincidental guess, that's not evidence of anything--unless you can prove that editors of Caputo's show do the same thing. That is, if she beats the raw-guess baseline by some statistically significant margin, a true "scientist" would have to see that as significant, and the existence of some dead-on guess by a cold reader somewhere, sometime, doesn't change that.)
If you know anything about LIM, too, you know Caputo often writes things down before the session (again, allegedly before). How would you account for her writing down "Michigan" on a tablet before she starts a session in Maryland, and it turns out that both the subject and the deceased had gotten their cancer diagnosis and/or treatment in Michigan? This wasn't "Oh, yeah, we went through Michigan several years ago on vacation," or "Yeah, I know where Michigan is, and it's right next to Illinois, where is next to Kentucky, where her mom went to college," or "Yeah, my sister-in-law had a first cousin whose husband worked for a guy from Michigan. Amazing." Nope. This is directly on-point to the disease that killed the deceased and nearly killed the subject. And "Michigan" was written down (allegedly) _before_ any questions were asked. How does that happen, exactly?
And also: Given the fact that even probable assertions are going to be wrong sometimes ("Are you wearing something right now in memory of your daughter?"), where are all the misses? If you say "on the editing-room floor," you may be right. But again, absence of evidence doesn't mean proof of the fact asserted. If you've ever seen a cold-reading session that goes on long enough with enough people, especially with individuals rather than groups, you know there are misses and redirections, lots of fishing around and vagueness, especially at first, and especially for someone who knows what he's listening for. That is not what's going on here.
I'm guessing your explanation for these things is that there "must have been" some fakery, research ("hot reading"), etc. But that is a fundamentally anti-scientific position. You don't know what "must have been," but you make that assumption because of your prior belief. Your evidence for what "must have been" is that it's self-evident, because of what you believe to be true (and, to be fair, what has been established as usually or almost always true).
But then, I don't know why I'm going into details when you have no intent to engage. The reason you think of all this as "extremely long-winded" and the reason you insult people you don't even know by accusing them of lacking either the ability or intelligence to read a book (and then avoid accepting responsibility for the insult later), is that, again, you want to state your position and have that be enough. If so, OK, fine. You've stated it. If that was all you were after, you're done.
But this is what much of your argument boils down to: Because the result is the same, the cause must be the same, even though there are quite obviously multiple possible causes.
Over and over, you give far more credence to the possibility of the supernatural than you do to the actual and observable.
You admit there is a good deal of this show is easy to fake, but when it comes to the various examples that you can't explain (the number "five"? really?) somehow, MAGIC.
Which is really saying that you think she uses the long-debunked scam method, and yet simultaneously communicates with the dead. She's a fake, and she's not! Do you see how absurd that is? Do you see how much leeway you give her?
Magical thinking blurs scientific reality.
Let's break this down. Her shtick asks us to go along with her on a few concepts. One of the big ones is that there is a special place dead people hang out. You know the one. There's a magical dimension, one that lies just parallel with ours, where moaning, bluish-grey, see-through dead people float along in some kind of foggy haze. They are incredibly concerned with our daily lives, and they try desperately to talk to us. But it's so hard! Because the damned haze they live in. It's hard to communicate through. So they think little concepts and pictures, like say, "five", and Caputo, she picks up on them, because she has a special antenna that can crack through the haze that dead people live in.
Do you believe in this place?
Because if you think she's at all telling the truth, you also MUST believe that this place exists.
And here's the thing! In the entire history of this earth, there have been no concrete examples of this construct. No spirits, no afterlife, no door between life and death. No floating, moaning dead people who use odd, random things like the number five to try and talk to solid people.
But we DO know of these things, and we can picture them. Why? Because they are all from stories we have told each other over the millennia.
We dream these stories. We imagine them. We create them.
And these stories all come from our primal fear of dying.
Religion, mediums, the afterlife, all of it. We are terrified as a species of death, because we, of all the species on this earth, know it best. So we've created these stories and beliefs to help us feel better.
Look. At it's most effective, cold reading is a goddamn art form. She has obviously spent her entire life perfecting that art. It's very impressive, I've admitted that before.
But it's not magic. It's psychological manipulation of the feelings stemming from our greatest fear.
I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness.
[deleted]
He/she isn't a troll, really. Just someone eager to share their recently attained vocabulary from philosophy class.
I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness.
[deleted]
Damn. It's these types of threads/debates I am SOOOOO going to miss once IMDb closes these boards down. *sigh*
-----------------------------
Godzilla is approaching the generator. The generator is losing power.
Wait, here's the short version, in case you're not really interested in examples, details, etc., which I think is the case:
1. Dear Sir or Madam: You may be right.
2. Specifically, you have constructed a scenario in which the claim that Caputo is a fake is plausible.
Your friend,
Me
[deleted]
emncaity, why are you writing books in this thread? Trust me you're not that interesting.
If you're trying to make a point, learn about this word, "Summarize." Then put it to use.
If you are that gullible to believe that someone can talk to the dead, I'm terribly sorry for you.
Let me let you go with this, the burden of proof of unexplained phenomena lay with the claimer of it's legitimacy.
To question it is completely natural.
There is not one shred of evidence that such a thing as a "medium" exists. Therefore, this person is nothing more than a con-artist.
[deleted]
Yeah, much better they should believe your bullsh$%, because you're such a great guy you'll call somebody a "cun%" who you don't even know.
No matter how important and serious you think you are, simply declaring what she does and says to be "bullsh$%" does not make it so.
How is she not a *beep* Making a fortune off of silly gullible people who (well they are obviously in on it) sell this show to other silly gullible people. share
How is she not a *beep* Making a fortune off of silly gullible people who (well they are obviously in on it) sell this show to other silly gullible people.
Again: Simply declaring what she does to be "bullsh$%" does not make it so.
It would be reasonable to make what you're saying here a conditional. As in: "If she is a fake, making a fortune off silly gullible poeple and selling this show to other silly gullible people, she is a *beep*." That would make sense. The problem is, you're treating what she does as unquestionably false, rather than possibly or probably false. share
[deleted]
"No, the fact that she's a fraud makes what she does "bullsh$%". Fact."
Okay, so you don't know the difference between a fact and a proposition. That is, you consider strength of belief to confer the status of "fact" upon an assertion.
Noted.
[deleted]