5 ms·

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 b

by the_af 4y ago

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?

SuoDuanDao 4y ago
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.
- generalizations 4y ago
  Sounds like a form of guided therapy.
- the_af 4y ago
  > 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.
- samman 4y ago
  Could you summarize a theory or two about the mechanism by which the question asked could affect what cards are drawn?
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    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. [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303264799000040 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032... [3]https://github.com/temporalholonics/holistic-temporality-and-flow/edit/main/Research https://github.com/temporalholonics/holistic-temporality-and...
    - the_af 4y ago
      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.
- burkaman 4y ago
  > before running an experiment 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?
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    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.
    - the_af 4y ago
      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.
      - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        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.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  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.
kukkeliskuu 4y ago
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.
- the_af 4y ago
  Thanks for the honest reply. 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")?
  - atkailash 4y ago
    [dead]
  - kukkeliskuu 4y ago
    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.
  - kukkeliskuu 4y ago
    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.

by the_af 4y ago

SuoDuanDao 4y ago

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.

generalizations 4y ago
Sounds like a form of guided therapy.
the_af 4y ago
> 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.
samman 4y ago
Could you summarize a theory or two about the mechanism by which the question asked could affect what cards are drawn?
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  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. [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303264799000040 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032... [3]https://github.com/temporalholonics/holistic-temporality-and-flow/edit/main/Research https://github.com/temporalholonics/holistic-temporality-and...
  - the_af 4y ago
    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.
burkaman 4y ago
> before running an experiment 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?
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  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.
  - the_af 4y ago
    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.
    - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
      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.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
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.

kukkeliskuu 4y ago

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.

the_af 4y ago
Thanks for the honest reply. 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")?
- atkailash 4y ago
  [dead]
- kukkeliskuu 4y ago
  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.
- kukkeliskuu 4y ago
  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.