So I decided to take a look at one of those videos you see posted all over your news feeds in which people believe without any hesitation. This video basically illustrates how a pre-recorded magician is going to guess the card that is on your mind. After watching you will see that all he did was jumble the cards and suits to produce an illusion that yours is missing. If you go back and analyze the remaining cards, you will see, at least in my instance, that your card is halfway there. This reminded me of our into in chapter one, on pseudoscience. I believe that this perfectly demonstrates how someone's supposed "expertise" is appealing to a false authority, being us. This also draws my attention back to the Q-Ray. It was advertised to get people to believe that it does such wonderful things, such as this instance of mind reading. How do we really know though? If it's not labeled as a definite in science, is it automatically considered pseudoscience? This trick definitely breaks the laws of reality as well as going against what can be replicated. I do understand its a trick not so much as an ancient belief or even a home remedy to disease. Could this still be considered a part of pseudoscience since it follows the general guidelines?
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The Q-Ray bracelet reminded me of a couple of years ago. I don't know if you were at that age, but I was a sophomore in high school when bracelets similar to the Q-Ray were invented. They were made for performance and were proven to increase stamina and stability. A lot of baseball players used to wear them, as well as gymnasts. This makes me think about whether they actually did help, or were they just a placebo? It was most likely our minds telling us that these bracelets really did help, which caused us to notice more positive instances of great stamina, etc.
ReplyDeleteHi Kim, I have to admit that when I first watched this video I was pretty surprised that the magician was able to "guess my card". After I watched it once, I went back to the cards to select from and than noticed that they were not the same cards that were shown at the end of the video, giving you the illusion that he was able to guess your card.
ReplyDelete-Jeff Wicks