Psychics

Horoscopes, astrology, palmistry…they’ve never been easier to access than they are today, thanks to the advent of the Internet. Free psychic readings are easily available all across the Web, fulfilling any possible desire you might have for a psychic consultation. From online chats with psychics to interactive tarot programs, free psychic readings are available everywhere and anywhere. Which raises the question, however, of whether or not this is a good thing.

Psychics have been around for centuries; most of the time, free psychic readings are given out by psychics as a means of luring customers in for another, longer, “better,” paid session. Psychics can generally be quickly and easily proven to be little more than actors pretending to fulfill a role for their customers, and the free psychic readings they offer are just a way to get those customers interested in the first place. People who would never otherwise choose to engage in a psychic consultation can be lured in by the promise of free psychic readings.

So what’s wrong with giving out such free psychic readings? After all, it’s not as if customers are being forced to come to the psychic, and these are free psychic readings. Furthermore, if the free psychic readings lead to people feeling better about themselves or the world around them, then those reading would seem to be worthwhile somewhat.

There is something to the above argument, that any kind of comfort that can be gained from free psychic readings should not be frowned upon; only when people begin paying exorbitant sums of money in the search for the same kind of comfort should something be done about the situation. There is, however, another argument to be made, under which the kind of comfort being offered by free psychic readings is false and empty, and therefore should be avoided simply because of the way in which it manipulates you. Most free psychic readings are based on simplistic facts and generalizations, designed to allow you to fill in the blanks left by the vague statements so that you feel that these are actually personalized statements, directly about yourself. In other words, the psychic is playing off of your own emotions and desire for the readings to be true, in order to lure you into paying money. This is a technique called cold reading, and it is often used in free psychic readings.

Belief in the ability of psychics to genuinely perform psychic readings that are true and complete is perhaps the most dangerous consequence of attending too many free psychic readings. After all, generally speaking, psychics can be proven false with ease, unless they are making such general statements that they cannot be proven either true or false. Essentially, a psychic’s statements will either be falsifiable, in which case they can be disproved, or they will be non-falsifiable statements that require the customer’s interpretation to have any meaning. Belief in the truthfulness of these non-falsifiable statements is the most unfortunate consequence of attending free psychic readings.

Regardless, however, it is the decision of every person whether or not he or she wants to partake in free psychic readings. After all, who knows? The psychic might, this time,

Trials of Psychics

It can be tough to find a good psychic in America, and now, no one knows it better than Heidi Montag. On March 18, 2010, Heidi came out saying that she would fire her manager, who was also psychic, after only a week of keeping him around. She had originally hired Aiden Chase, a Malibu psychic, to replace Spencer Pratt as her business manager. Spencer Pratt, of course, is Heidi Montag’s husband of about 18 months. Not long after hiring Chase a week, to be exact Montag fired him, somewhat unsurprisingly.

Montag and Chase had worked together with Chase using his psychic expertise as Montag’s “intuitive healer” after she had 10 plastic surgeries in one day. Apparently, it took only a month of such work for Montag to decide that she’d rather have the psychic in the managerial position than her Pratt, who’d been in the position for 5 years. Of course, when People magazine attempted to reach Chase for a comment, he claimed that he had no knowledge of a change in his business relationship with Montag. So much for that psychic thing.

Montag’s relationship with a psychic is by no means rare for celebrities; people with that much money have often been known to seek out aid and advice from what are generally considered less than reputable sources, such as psychics. After all, if they have the money to burn and there is a chance that the psychic will be correct in his or her predictions, it would seem to be worth it to spend the money. Psychic consultations, then, are not altogether unheard of for celebrities. But putting a psychic into a business role seems like a rather different issue entirely.

If a psychic genuinely doe shave psychic skills, and he is able to put those skills to use as a business person, then yes, it would seem like a particularly good deal to put a psychic into such a position. But the faultiness of psychics, in general, seems to make putting them into such a position problematic, to say the least. Psychics seem to have fairly fluctuating success rates, and as a result, using a psychic as a business consultant doesn’t seem to be the brightest move. Psychics are probably best thought of as personal consultants; if nothing else, a psychic is someone whom you can talk to, even for a little bit, someone with whom you can express yourself a bit. Heidi Montag’s decision to turn her psychic, who doesn’t seem to have even filled the traditional predictive role of the psychic, but instead played the part of a psychic healer, seems more than a little bit hasty, as does her decision to become her own manager. After all, if she first chose to replace her husband, who clearly had done an alright job with her career for five years, with a psychic whom she fired a week later, then it would seem that she should be putting the important decisions of her career from the business perspective into the hands of someone with a better understanding of those decisions. But then again, Heidi Montag had ten plastic surgeries in a single day, another decision that seems somewhat poor. Perhaps she should have had a psychic then, to tell her how much it was going to hurt her. Maybe then, she could have avoided this entire mess.