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Desrtopa comments on "Mind reading" - how is this done? - Less Wrong Discussion
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After having read this book, I assign a rather high prior to "he employs some extremely complicated technique, possibly involving some long honed skill ordinary people would never bother with, which no layperson could realistically hope to guess." One of the takeaways I got from that book is that while some magic relies on simple, elegant tricks which seem obvious in hindsight, a lot of the killer tricks are really, really complicated. He may not even be employing the same technique in every permutation of the trick; magicians routinely learn a wide array of methods for accomplishing individual "effects."
Can you give a specific example of one of these killer tricks that is really, really complicated?
Well, there's this. Not an example of mentalism, but a card trick from earlier in his career. Everything in it is basically sleight of hand and misdirection, but there are so many different techniques in there, strung together with such precision, that it would be extremely difficult to replicate without a huge amount of training.
I don't know if this is the kind of thing Desrtopa was talking about.
I no longer have the book for reference to recall any of the exact techniques, but the author developed an original trick for an international magic competition involved not only misdirection techniques, but original math developed in collaboration with a statistician, and the manual precision to perfectly shuffle a deck repeatedly so that it retains its original order after four shuffles.
Read Brown's books. He explains really quite a lot of his tricks. And yes, some are quite complicated. It's revelatory stuff.