Vladimir comments on Psychic Powers - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 September 2008 07:28PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (93)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir 03 January 2016 10:42:41PM *  1 point [-]

Can't believe this got three upvotes on lesswrong.

Derren Brown doesn't use "psychological techniques" for his tricks. They are just tricks plain and simple. Either this was a confederate, or he repeated it until he got the result he wanted. His whole schtick is to pretend to be using "NLP" or some mind trick, when in reality it's your old fashion I've-got-a-camera-looking-at-your-answer trick. He's pretty upfront about this in his books.

The genius of it is that precisely by not pretending to be "magic", he actually draws in a sophisticated audience who genuinely thinks he's using psychological mind games. Precisely by eliminating his status as an omniscient magical guru, he gains status as an intuitive social genius which is more impressive for a modern audience.