anonmedics:

“That the charges in the trials often referred to events that had occurred decades earlier, that witchcraft was made a crimen exceptum, that is, a crime to be investigated by special means, torture included, and it was punishable even in the absence of any proven damage to persons and things -…

Fifth in a series about memorizing the results of the Forer experiment in the author’s attempt to improve his practice in divination.

“Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.”

This may be my favorite. I think this judgment is powerful due to its unexpectedness. Most of these readings, after all, are about how Everything Is Going To Be OK and Maybe I Detect An Air Of Faerie In Your Aura and all that shit. When you come out and start talking about things that nobody is supposed to talk about - especially something intensely personal that most people have learned to completely suppress - well, this is just a bigger gun. I’m not sure exactly where I’d include this principle in a divination, but I guess you never know.

Then again, aren’t a majority of questions right now regarding troubles of the heart? In a society in which sex is completely repressed, many people don’t even consider talking about sexual repression as a source of their problems, even when those problems are explicitly sexual. What’s love? What’s attraction? What are the proper codes of conduct before, during, and after courtship? Most people don’t even know how biological imperatives and ego drive us toward attractive people - or who wrote the contemporary relationship guidelines and why (hint: nobody with your best interests in mind). Hell, we don’t even talk about our sexual relationships as “sexual,” just as “relationships.” Expressing that you’re getting laid by telling others “I am in a relationship” implies a lack of importance in your non-sexual relationships, whether they’re to your bank teller or your best friend. Thus, talking about sex to a heartbroken person is a fine way to start the necessary process of recontextualizing their experiences within the context of sexuality, and not the kind handed down to them by Jerry Springer, Oprah, or Pat Robertson.

I’ve skipped one or two days now on this; my interest is starting to flag in this project, partially because I’m traveling and partially because I haven’t yet put in enough effort to cross the midpoint. I’ve gotta keep it up, however, since my new deck is waiting when I get home and I’ve gotta get cracking on card interps next. Part of me feels a bit foolish for taking on this project so quickly after finals, but hey - why not ride the good homework habits I’ve established? Like powering down a hill on a bicycle in order to ride your inertia up the other side, I’ve now come far enough through this Forer project that I may as well finish. Besides, if I can’t muster the gumption to memorize one paragraph on tour, organic chemistry nomenclature this fall is going to be trouble.

Fourth in a daily series about memorizing the results of the Forer experiment in the author’s attempt to improve his practice in divination.

“While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.”

The first explicitly non-positive trait in the list. I guess it gives some credit to the hearer, as well as providing an opportunity for the diviner to test boundaries. After all, nobody’s going to react by claiming perfection - the only possibility is to think about the “personality weaknesses” to which the diviner is referring.

Several of these statements are more obvious in their generality. Divination works better if people believe in it, and the foci of divination (cards, tea leaves, runes) provide just enough randomness to believe that there’s something unique about the reading that refers to the situation.

In the case of statements the hearer doesn’t think are true about themselves, they’ll likely deflect the judgment and apply the phrase to the situation rather than to themselves. That’s where the magic happens: the diviner gives statements that help the listener uncover their own inner realizations about their problems, the hints from their heart about what they really feel is the truth of the situation or the right thing to do.

This is a bit of an extension of faith to the listener, to believe that they’ll do the right thing given no really new information. After all, divination is just a catalyst - it’s an aid to the decision-making process, though the decision is ultimately not up to the diviner, but to the divined. That doesn’t prevent a diviner from taking advantage, from trying to subtly influence his or her subjects, but it’s unlikely that one would do so with selfless motives. I guess I’d count that as a “personality weakness,” another signal that these traits are all as appropriate to oneself as to others…

Third in a daily series about memorizing the results of the Forer experiment in the author’s attempt to improve his practice in divination.

“You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.”

This is an easy one to apply to myself too. After all, I’m blogging on Tumblr right now instead of finishing my homework before finals.

This sentence, like the last one (“You have a tendency to be critical of yourself”) has a light and a dark side. Every circus artist wrestles with this feeling, especially when exposed to lifelong performers. Why didn’t I stick in gymnastics? Why didn’t I start juggling ten years ago? Why didn’t I start taking drawing lessons sooner? Why didn’t I code as a kid?

We all fight with these feelings all the time, all of us in our own ways. But that’s a false dissatisfaction; comparison is pointless, especially when you meet those performers who’ve only been doing one thing their entire lives and are little more than peacocks. And besides, “having unused capacity” doesn’t necessarily imply that said “capacity” was meant to be filled before the present. After all, I’m only thirty and if I do anything close to the amount of living I’ve done thus far by the time I’m sixty, well!

Second in a daily series about memorizing the results of the Forer experiment in the author’s attempt to improve his practice in divination.

“You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.”

One of the powerful things about these statements is that I can look at - or think of - anybody, and privately make these statements about them to myself, and notice that they’re probably true. It’s been a way of humanizing people around me: how is this person self-critical? What does their great need for other people to like and admire them feel like? It’s very true for me, of course, that I’m critical of myself, so this sentence, too, is easy to remember.

The word “tendency” in the original wording of this principle is easy for me to memorize, since my tai chi teacher is always telling people “you have this tendency” or “the tendency is to lean back like so” as a way of drawing attention to a bad habit. I’ve adopted the habit in my own workshops - “The tendency in contact juggling is for the elbows to drop to the sides” or somesuch. So maybe this will turn into a tendency to view tendency toward self-criticism in a somewhat negative light.

I suppose it’s not entirely a bad habit, and the Forer Effect becomes stronger when evaluations are positive traits. Being conscious of this has already quietly helped recover my respect for others, realizing that everyone else is walking around feeling like they could be doing better, just like I do. And knowing about this trait as an insecurity can help me solve it in others - and can help me solve it for myself in those times when my inner naysayer won’t shut up. I can also use this trait as a hook - what are you feeling self-critical about? After all: where self-criticism isn’t a neurosis, it’s doing its other job as an inner impulse reminding you that you had somewhere to be.

unforeseen-consequences:

Now you are reading this so you can’t juggle.

“You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.”

This has been an easy trait to identify in myself and others. All day yesterday I walked around watching people, looking at them, and silently saying: “You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.” That’s something with which I identify and it’s taken various forms over the course of my life.

As a teenager, I discovered this need taking form in a kind of obsequiousness with my compatriots and colleagues… always unwilling to say anything that anyone didn’t want to hear. Later on, as I would come to understand the interconnectedness of all things, this crystallized into its most extreme form - a lack of tolerance for any behavior in myself or others that would alienate people from one another. Part of this was based on a saying given me by a wise anarchist: “You can never change the unwilling; you can only provide the instruments with which the willing can change themselves.” In other words, don’t critique someone when you could provide someone willing with the information they need to make the same kind of progress as you.

But being an activist, I’ve since rediscovered the cynicism that got me through my teenage years. On the general level, it’s had to do with the general lack of interest in the burgeoning protest movement, the crushing of the uprising being met by a throwing up of hands and a muttering of, “Well, see, protesting doesn’t work anyway” by those who couldn’t be bothered to show up. On a more personal level, cynicism reared its ugly head after another acquaintance with sexual hierarchy, and the way unrequited love can look exceedingly stupid in hindsight when coming to the realization that you’re “just not in someone’s league,” a principle stemming from monogamy, that engine of social control.

A close friend from the days of yore commented: “How do you avoid becoming incredibly bitter?” I responded, “Are you kidding? I *am* incredibly bitter.” It’s only by taking the long view that I can maintain hope for humanity these days, either crossing my fingers for an eventual enlightenment or trusting that the next sentient species will do better after we blow ourselves up or irradiate ourselves to death.

In other words, I’m tired of giving people the long leash they use to hang themselves, even if the only thing I can do is give the leash an obnoxious tug sometimes to remind people that it’s there, and they’re not fooling anyone by pretending that someone else is forcing them to wear it. Or as it’s popularly said here in Oakland: “I’nt give a fuck.”

Of course, making that statement implicitly suggests that fucks are being given, or the statement wouldn’t be made. In other words, I do give a fuck; we all do. In my own case, it’s just a matter of being liked and admired by people who appreciate a certain standard. Everyone else has their own positive traits, and I don’t have to know them firsthand to know that everyone uses their own in part for the sake of acquiring the admiration of their peers.

I’m currently going through the process of memorizing the paragraph that coined the Forer Effect, a.k.a. the tendency for people to believe that general statements are tailored to them despite being, well, general statements.

Long story short: psychologist gives a bunch of students “personality tests.” Then he throws them in the garbage and compiles a generic “result” that he pieces together from the local horoscopes. Then he privately returns the “results” of the test and asks students to rate them on a scale of 0 (totally off) to 5 (uncannily accurate). Average rating was a 4.26. In other words, there’s a correlation between a belief that you’ve tailored a general statement about someone if:

A) they have reason to believe it’s specific analysis (i.e. your bullshitting ability)

B) the subject believes you have some kind of authority (lab coat, expensive crystals, beautiful Tarot deck, native ancestry)

C) the analysis contains positive traits (i.e. shit they want to hear).

To me, divination is a way of straddling the gap between my love for mysticism and my contempt for charlatans. After all, no natural phenomenon is supernatural, but that doesn’t prevent quite a few folks from making a grip by telling gullible and rich hippies what they want to hear. In the defense of hippies, they don’t have this behavior on lockdown, and if I lived in Texas I’d probably be grouching about faith healers rather than crystal healers. Still, that doesn’t mean that I ain’t pissed about how embarrassingly little many of my associates know about science, and how much they’re willing to believe of pseudoscience.

Divination works, but not via a literal means of divining the future. It’s like flipping a coin; the mechanism of making the right decision isn’t to trust the coin, but to trust that when the coin gets into the air, you’ll get a sudden hunch about the way you want the coin to fall. No need to look at the coin - just recognize that impulse and follow it. In the same way, any form of divination is a general enough formula to show you your problem in a new light in order to help the right decision come from within.

And as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the fact that these statements apply to “everybody” mean that they also apply to myself. As such, I’ll be ruminating on each of these statements every day for yesterday and the next twelve days. This will not only ensure that I remember all of these Barnum statements (as they’re now called after P.T. Barnum famously stated “We’ve got something for everybody”), but will also give me a means of connecting my own experience with everyone else’s, a practice I can probably afford to better maintain.

…or just enough.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/02/20122297323035290.html

They’ve started going after independent hackers calling them “Anonymous.” This is going to get a lot worse in the States, where Anonymous is already loosely being classified as a terrorist organization. Tangentially: Pacotron… my new favorite hacker name?