4 ms·

James Randi did a similar trick, i.e. one even less reliant on mechanical tricks or a quick hand but rather on human bias. Students in a class were given horos

by praptak 12y ago

James Randi did a similar trick, i.e. one even less reliant on mechanical tricks or a quick hand but rather on human bias. Students in a class were given horoscopes in envelopes marked with their birth dates. The students were then asked to read the horoscopes and tell if they were accurate. Most were amazed how accurate the horoscopes were. The trick is that every student had been given the same horoscope which was just cleverly written.

jonahx 12y ago
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw
tokenadult 12y ago
This is a demonstration of the fallacy of personal validation. (And yet personal validation is brought up in dozens of replies on Hacker News each day.) That demonstration of the fallacy of personal validation was first made by psychologist Bertram R. Forer (1914-2000), who published a paper about the experiment in 1949.[1] Because Forer was the first to publish about an experiment on the issue, the phenomenon is sometimes called the Forer Effect.[2] The fallacy of personal validation is one of the bases of the practice of "cold reading," pretending to read someone's mind by throwing out wild guesses and observing which wild guesses are accepted by an observer.[3] [1] http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Forer_The%20fallacy%20of%20personal%20validation_1949.pdf http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/... [2] http://skepdic.com/forer.html http://skepdic.com/forer.html http://badpsychologyblog.org/post/33441629830/the-forer-barnum-effect http://badpsychologyblog.org/post/33441629830/the-forer-barn... [3] http://skepdic.com/coldread.html http://skepdic.com/coldread.html http://denisdutton.com/cold_reading.htm http://denisdutton.com/cold_reading.htm
michaelbuckbee 12y ago
At an early web development job, I was in a pitch meeting for a horoscope website where the designer of the "system" asked for my birthday. I told him Oct 1st and he preceded to do his calculations and how it showed that I was obviously a leader and people looked up to me, and how it was so insightful etc. Only problem was that I was actually born on July 6th.
DonHopkins 12y ago
During the development of The Sims 1, Will Wright came up with the idea of assigning each of the Sims a Zodiacal sign, based on the personality points that the player "spent" on them on the character creation screen. He defined 12 different archetypal sets of personality point values, one for each sign, and it simply assigned the nearest sign to the character's current personality. Some of the other designers argued that we should come up with our own fictional astrological signs for the Sims, since there was already so much baggage associated with the traditional ones. But Will countered that the baggage was the whole point! So we implemented the design for assigning astrological signs in the character creation screen. But at that point, the assigned signs were purely cosmetic, and had absolutely no influence on anything else in the game. Then we let the testers take a crack at it, to make sure there weren't any bugs in the character creation screen. Of course the testers immediately started reporting problems that the character's astrological signs were effecting their behavior too much, and that the game needed to be tuned so that their signs did not influence their behavior so heavily. That's exactly the kind of behavior that Will was trying to influence by using "real" astrological signs, along with all their glorious baggage and preconceptions: the behavior of the player's mind, no the behavior of the game itself! It anything needs tuning, it's the player's belief in astrology.

by praptak 12y ago

jonahx 12y ago

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw

tokenadult 12y ago

This is a demonstration of the fallacy of personal validation. (And yet personal validation is brought up in dozens of replies on Hacker News each day.) That demonstration of the fallacy of personal validation was first made by psychologist Bertram R. Forer (1914-2000), who published a paper about the experiment in 1949.[1] Because Forer was the first to publish about an experiment on the issue, the phenomenon is sometimes called the Forer Effect.[2] The fallacy of personal validation is one of the bases of the practice of "cold reading," pretending to read someone's mind by throwing out wild guesses and observing which wild guesses are accepted by an observer.[3] [1] http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Forer_The%20fallacy%20of%20personal%20validation_1949.pdf http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/... [2] http://skepdic.com/forer.html http://skepdic.com/forer.html http://badpsychologyblog.org/post/33441629830/the-forer-barnum-effect http://badpsychologyblog.org/post/33441629830/the-forer-barn... [3] http://skepdic.com/coldread.html http://skepdic.com/coldread.html http://denisdutton.com/cold_reading.htm http://denisdutton.com/cold_reading.htm

michaelbuckbee 12y ago

At an early web development job, I was in a pitch meeting for a horoscope website where the designer of the "system" asked for my birthday. I told him Oct 1st and he preceded to do his calculations and how it showed that I was obviously a leader and people looked up to me, and how it was so insightful etc. Only problem was that I was actually born on July 6th.

DonHopkins 12y ago

During the development of The Sims 1, Will Wright came up with the idea of assigning each of the Sims a Zodiacal sign, based on the personality points that the player "spent" on them on the character creation screen. He defined 12 different archetypal sets of personality point values, one for each sign, and it simply assigned the nearest sign to the character's current personality. Some of the other designers argued that we should come up with our own fictional astrological signs for the Sims, since there was already so much baggage associated with the traditional ones. But Will countered that the baggage was the whole point! So we implemented the design for assigning astrological signs in the character creation screen. But at that point, the assigned signs were purely cosmetic, and had absolutely no influence on anything else in the game. Then we let the testers take a crack at it, to make sure there weren't any bugs in the character creation screen. Of course the testers immediately started reporting problems that the character's astrological signs were effecting their behavior too much, and that the game needed to be tuned so that their signs did not influence their behavior so heavily. That's exactly the kind of behavior that Will was trying to influence by using "real" astrological signs, along with all their glorious baggage and preconceptions: the behavior of the player's mind, no the behavior of the game itself! It anything needs tuning, it's the player's belief in astrology.