Why police detectives and the FBI consult psychics

I don't know. I think a lot of psychics are dismissed as frauds because they sometimes get things wrong. But considering the sketchiness of the data a psychic receives, for whatever reason, this is not unexpected. That's why I would go with the psychics with the best record of getting it right. If you had a missing child, and the police were at a dead in, wouldn't YOU consult a good psychic? What would you have to lose?

 

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Psychics are very good at throwing the vaguest of claims around, latching on to what they hear, the reactions of those they're speaking to, and if someone goes missing in an area then I'm fairly sure the psychic will do their research of the area before speaking to anyone, to get names of places, landmarks etc.

One reason that they prefer only working in the presence of "believers" is because it is more likely the believer will latch on to the apparent success and justify the failures, thus reinforcing in their own minds the ability of the psychic.

No psychic has ever been proven to be anything other than statistically consistent with the non-existence of psychic ability when in controlled tests. But the psychic will claim some reason why they couldn't succeed... the pressure, the presence of negative thoughts from unbelievers etc. Such arguments dismissing their failure only works to make psychic ability an unscientific and unprovable phenomenon.

 

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Typical absolute statement of the psuedoskeptic, giving the impression he has researched EVERY case of psychic detective work and/or scientific testing and found it to be just good guessing. Is it really so hard to read the cases I've already posted? Locations provided, circles on maps, names of the murderers, the method of murder, the location of the murder weapon, descriptions of the murderer not even known yet, etc and etc. Around 90 cases posted so far showing psychics to be dead on in their information. Many of them by the same psychics. Nobody can be THAT lucky on such specific details.

As for scientifically tested and confirmed psychic ability, start here:

The Princeton PEAR Project:

"In another class of studies, the ability of human participants to acquire information about spatially and temporally remote geographical targets, otherwise inaccessible by any of the usual sensory channels, has been thoroughly demonstrated over several hundred carefully conducted experiments. The protocol required one participant, the "agent," to be stationed at a randomly selected location at a given time, and there to observe and record impressions of the details and ambiance of the scene. A second participant, the "percipient," located far from the scene and with no prior information about it, tried to sense its composition and character and to report these in a similar format to the agent’s description.

Even casual comparison of the agent and percipient narratives produced in this body of experiments reveals striking correspondences in both their general and specific aspects, indicative of some anomalous channel of information acquisition, well beyond any chance expectation. Incisive analytical techniques have been developed and applied to these data to establish more precisely the quantity and quality of objective and subjective information acquired and to guide the design of more effective experiments. Beyond confirming the validity of this anomalous mode of information acquisition, these analyses demonstrate that this capacity of human consciousness is also largely independent of the distance between the percipient and the target, and similarly independent of the time between the specification of the target and the perception effort.

Over its long history, PEAR has accumulated over 650 remote perception trials, performed over several phases of investigation. Numerous scoring methods have involved various arrays of descriptor queries that have been addressed to both the physical targets and the percipients' subjective descriptions thereof, the responses to which have provided the basis for numerical evaluation and statistical assessment of the degree of anomalous information acquired under a variety of experimental protocols. Twenty-four such recipes were employed, with queries posed in binary, ternary, quaternary, and ten-level distributive formats. Thus treated, the composite database yields a probability against chance of approximately three parts in ten billion.

The overall results are not noticeably affected by any of the secondary protocol parameters tested, or by variations in descriptor effectiveness, possible participant response biases, target distances from the percipients, or time intervals between perception efforts and target visitations by the agents. However, over the evolution of the analysis programs there has been a striking diminution of the anomalous yield that appears to be associated with the participants' growing attention to, and dependence upon, the progressively more detailed descriptor formats. An intrinsic complementarity is thereby suggested between the analytical and intuitive aspects of the remote perception process that appears to limit the extent to which such anomalous effects can be simultaneously produced and evaluated (see "Information and Uncertainty in Remote Perception Research").--http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/experiments.html

 

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So you would believe the police over a psychic. Good for you! I suspect you really understand that psychics aren't all that reliable and are just yanking people's chains.

 

And I suspect you haven't read any of the crime cases I have posted so far along with quotes from the actual detectives and police who worked on them. Perhaps you were too obsessed with that Brazilian reality show showing how crime documentaries are all made up? lol!

 

OK fair enough; I was giving you too much credit.

Nope, never said that. Are you trying to "retrace your steps" here hoping no one notices?

 

So what did you mentioning that reality show prove about crime documentaries? Didn't you say fakery happens at TV stations "all the time."?

 

"Psychic" woudnt even make the botom of my list in tryin to solve a serous issue... an nether woud i seek out Jebus Big-Daddy or the Spook.!!!

But hay... i suspect that im in the minority... that the majority of people thank ther realy is somptin to this psychic stuff :shrug:

 

Yes..sadly a group of aging shut-in science nerds posting in an online science forum is no gauge for what is the norm on these issues. I'm often amused at how everybody here thinks skepticism is the mainstream view on paranormal phenomena. That I'm somehow "weird" because I don't believe such things cannot exist. But actually it's sorta weird to be in denial of it, expecially in light of all the TV shows/websites/newsstories demonstrating its existence in various ways. See below.

Three in Four Americans Believe in Paranormal

Little change from similar results in 2001

by David W. Moore

GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- About three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief, according to a recent Gallup survey. The most popular is extrasensory perception (ESP), mentioned by 41%, followed closely by belief in haunted houses (37%). The full list of items includes:



Believe in


%


Extrasensory perception, or ESP

41


That houses can be haunted

37


Ghosts/that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places/situations

32


Telepathy/communication between minds without using traditional senses

31


Clairvoyance/the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future

26


Astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives

25


That people can communicate mentally with someone who has died

21


Witches

21


Reincarnation, that is, the rebirth of the soul in a new body after death

20


Channeling/allowing a 'spirit-being' to temporarily assume control of body

9


A special analysis of the data shows that 73% of Americans believe in at least one of the 10 items listed above, while 27% believe in none of them. A Gallup survey in 2001 provided similar results -- 76% professed belief in at least one of the 10 items."---http://www.gallup.com/poll/16915/three-four-americans-believe-paranormal.aspx

 

Two in three believe in creationism in one form or another
7 out of 10 believe a human being would "pop" in space like an overinflated balloon
8 out of 10 believe that one side of the moon is always dark
5 out of 10 believe that "lightning never strikes the same place twice"

 

Ooo..if only more people would stay at home and watch Discovery Channel shows instead of going out and being normal people! Being hyperinformed isn't all its cracked up to be.

 

One person actually believed all of the items.

 

Nope. I don't buy astrology, reincarnation, OR spirit channeling.

 

Cause those are just silly.

 

No...lack of evidence is enough for me. I'm not really concerned with how "silly" believing in something makes me appear. That's your crowd..

 

I don't expect you to. That just isn't what you are about.

Say it: none of that helped find a body.

Interesting. So despite saying in your previous post that you would start dealing with the other sentence in your OP, you are still ignoring your own thesis from your OP. Again: not shocked.

No, of course I'm not hoping you forget: I'm hoping you'll eventually start addressing that point! (again: not holding my breath). Note that a negative is inherently unprovable: All I can do keep knocking-down every piece of crap that you throw at the wall. So far so good.

So some police are as gullible as you -- so what? That isn't the point here. The point is that the psychics' advice didn't lead to finding the bodies. The police found the bodies on their own. A quote that says the police believe the psychic help is not evidence that the psychic helped. Again: I pulled a clear quote out of the mess you vomited on the thread that said explicitly that all of the hints the psychics gave yielded nothing. It's your quote. You can't successfully pretend you didn't post it.....though perhaps with all this flooding I would be willing to believe you didn't read what you posted.

 

So that sounds like an acknowledgement that - at the very least - most of the data is useless.

Time.
Money.
Sanity.

 

No doubt. It would be irresponsible to do anything less...though MR seems to want to believe they start out with nothing and pull everything out of the air. Indeed, getting information ahead of time would be difficult to avoid. In the case where the psychic flipped a coin and got a right answer, MR would have us believe she knew nothing of the suspects...which would be difficult since she somehow showed-up at the suspect's house. I'm not sure how she got there, but it strains credulity to believe she didn't know where she was going. Here's how that might work though:

[bbbbrrrrrrrriiiiing]

Fake Psychic: I'll tell you vague things you want to hear, Inc. Lady Gaga speaking?

Gullible/Desperate Cop: Wow, that's a really cumbersome company name. Anyway, I have a case I can't solve and I'm willing to try anything.

Fake Psychic: Near water and a highway! Er, I mean, great! I'm happy to play on your desperation. Don't tell me anything about the case; I work better in complete, feigned ignorance because then it seems more impressive when I recite details about the case I read in the newspaper while faking an orgasm to make me look like I'm possessed.

Gullible/Desperate Cop: Great. I'll be over to pick you up in a few minutes. I have a black hood I seized from a terrorist for you to wear and some speed metal to blast in the car on the way over, so you can avoid learning anything else you didn't already read in the newspaper and I can honestly say I didn't give you any information about the case when asked later.

Fake Psychic: Awesome. I hope you end up finding the body and solving the case despite me leading you on a wild goose chase so I can claim that since I was part of the team, I am due an equal share of the credit even though I didn't do anything useful except increase my walk-in traffic for palm readings.

 

I think it's more to do with resources and manpower. Police will only investigate something for a time and then a case goes cold, resources and manpower are then shifted elsewhere. Having "consultants" that likely might trudge through the paperwork for nominal "finders fees" is a cheap way to keep somebody active on those cases so they can attempt to generate closure. It might mean keeping one paid policemen on it just to make sure there is no evidence tampering etc, but if there was a positive outcome it would just be from increasing the chances of a result occurring by not having the case going dusty on a shelf.

The main problem with consultants working on a pro bono basis is they can claim success even when there isn't one, if they are paid for results then only when they have achieved results would they get paid which in turn would identify a positive result purely because of their involvement. Pro bono anyone can run around asking questions and claim they are responsible for closing a case since there isn't any evidence to support or deny the depth of their involvement.

 

Isaac Newton was an astrologer.