Stephen Mather and Spencer examine pseudotangibility—how the brain latches onto physical symbols (tarot cards, astrology) to impose meaning on vague or random inputs, like "the amazing Randy’s" generic profiles. They critique HR tools (Myers-Briggs, DISC) as flawed yet persuasive, comparing them to biblical divination methods and childlike schemas. Science avoids this trap by rejecting intuitive pattern-finding in favor of evidence-based rigor, though fields like economics still struggle. The takeaway: critical thinking demands skepticism toward symbolic shortcuts, even if they’re comforting, to prevent poor decisions in life or work. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I have a special guest today, Stephen Mather.
How are you doing, Stephen?
Hi, Spencer.
So we just had a conversation a few weeks ago that appeared on your podcast.
And I kind of cross-broadcast on my podcast because I liked it so much.
And you let me do that.
That was, thank you very much.
And immediately after, I was listening to it and thinking about it and everything else that I had another idea that it's one of those situations.
I'm sure you've had this situation.
And I don't know why we don't have a word in English for this phenomenon, which is that after a conversation, you think afterward what you should have said, what you should have thought of, that you didn't think of in the moment.
So in the absence of an actual word for that, we have to describe it.
More thought that the English language isn't yet complete.
Yeah, there's probably a German word for that, actually.
Oh, just like that.
The Germans probably have thought of that.
Yeah, that's right.
Schaaden Freud and all these words that we didn't think about.
Yeah, yeah.
They're just somehow brilliant.
They just tag a load of words together and make them in a new word that's four words that all slur together.
Yeah, exactly.
Like Welten Schwang.
Yeah.
Welterschwang.
Yeah, exactly.
That's one of my favorites.
Yeah, I really enjoyed that conversation too.
So thank you for doing it.
So the chance to continue it.
Of course, I was going to jump for that.
Oh, all right.
So we also have the uncomfortable situation in that we are continuing a conversation and things that we're about to talk about are directly related to sort of groundwork that we laid in the last conversation.
So we almost have to do a previously on, which I always hate about TV shows and I hate that I have to do it now.
But here we are because we didn't come up with this in the moment.
Not clever enough.
That's what this is called.
So we're talking about neuroscience.
For anyone who missed that conversation and needs a recap, we were talking about a very small part of neuroscience in which we talk about the fact that the brain is coming up with what's essentially a model of everything that you know.
Everything that you can think of, everything that you can imagine is from a great database inside your own mind of a model of how everything works and how everything fits together.
And this is how your mind really works in the shadowy background.
Even the things that you're looking at right now are actually just a model of those things that is interpreted through first the lens of your eyes and then through a cerebral cortex that arranges everything and it puts it together with the sound because in actuality, the sound and the view aren't perfectly aligned, but your brain does that for you so that the thing you call yourself that experiences things can see that in there's no mismatch there.
And your brain is in very small ways lying to you and telling you some scrubbed version of reality in every real moment.
And this is all part of the model that's in your mind.
It's very fascinating to read about.
I love it.
But it leads to a lot of understanding about other things that your mind is doing.
And that's why I like to read about it.
I like to talk about it.
And I like to relate it to things that are going on, because I think that if people understood more about what their brain was doing, it's a lot like driving a car.
If you understand more about how your engine works, then while you're driving your car, you might have a better idea of when it needs to go to the mechanic, when it just needs the tires rotated, for example, all sorts of other little things that you might be able to really do to improve your life and yourself and your decisions by understanding how your brain is really doing this.
So in this idea that there's a model of things, that already is already just a metaphor that we use to apply language to this problem.
We have tangible items in our world.
I'm sitting at a desk.
I'm sitting on a chair.
I'm sitting inside a room.
When I describe these things to us on the podcast and you're listening, you're picturing something that looks like a desk, something that looks like a chair, something that looks like a room.
And you can kind of see in your own mind something about where I'm in because these are tangible objects.
But as soon as I talk about intangible things, this is where it becomes more problematic.
So we have, if I'm going to talk about trust, if I'm going to talk about courage, if I'm going to talk about any of the emotions that we feel, these things are intangible.
And it's more difficult for you to visualize them because there isn't a tangible analog that you can point to and say, that's what courage looks like.
We only have sort of examples of some people doing these things.
And, you know, we can point to thing, you know, courageous things that people have done in history and say, well, that's what courage looks like.
And then there's another person who did a completely different thing in history.
That's also what courage looks like.
And immediately you get this muddled view of courage.
Like, oh, it's all kinds of things, I guess.
And that's the problem with language and the problem with trying to communicate is that we don't really know what anyone else is picturing when we talk about intangible things.
So that's where we start.
And that's what we talked about.
The groundwork we laid last conversation.
Have I missed anything so far, Stephen?
No, well, I guess my reflections on that would also be that we started thinking about magical thinking.
So the basis for our discussion was this term magical thinking that it's a lovely sort of poetic way of describing something, I think, magical thinking.
And actually, when you get into what that means, it seems that actually we all do it.
So I was thinking about magical thinking as being, you know, belief in superstitions and belief in all sorts of belief systems that there's no evidence for.
But actually, we all engage in some forms of magical thinking.
We talked about watching a sports match and getting excited and geeing on the players when you're watching it on TV, maybe recorded from 12 hours ago, you know, and obviously there's no relationship there, but we still feel somehow that our efforts might have some impact upon it.
So we all engage in it to a degree.
And I think that's where this, the conversation went into the area that you're talking about and the use of models.
I think the other thing I would say as a, not a challenge, but a thing just to be aware of is that neuroscience or labeling this as neuroscience is only one way of interrogating this concept.
So actually, you know, I'm trained in psychology.
So psychologists have quite a lot to say about this, but so do philosophers, even historians.
And so, and to some degree, it depends what level you want to talk about this at.
So, you know, sure, neuroscience, okay, but once we start getting into the mechanical functions of the brain, such as firing neurons, then it starts to lose its relevance.
You know, it doesn't actually tell us very much about the concept.
So, yeah, it's a very tricky one.
And you're also using language in order to describe something that's happening in our thinking, both of which are the subject of the actual discussion.
So it's, you know, doubly, it's a really tangled knot that we're trying to unpick, I think.
Yeah, it gets very meta in a hurry, right?
Yeah.
So the concept I sort of cobbled together here in my, that I didn't think of last conversation that sort of all the pieces clicked together.
And I thought was really interesting was that in a lot of situations where we have this magical thinking, where the magical thinking has taken hold in multiple people, let's say, because everyone is able to have magical thinking and imaginary things that only make sense to them themselves.
I do a thing in my brain related to the arrangement of letters that I have not been able to describe to anyone.
And the few people I've attempted to, they just kind of go blank and they go, it doesn't make any sense to me.
I don't know why this matters.
I'm going to move on.
And it's right.
It doesn't make any sense to anyone else.
It's just a thing my brain does when it's not focused on anything relevant.
It's also a reason why I try to focus on relevant things very often because I don't want to go down that hole where I'm just rearranging letters constantly.
But in a lot of cases where this has been communicated between many people and become what might be called individual instances of magical thinking.
And I think we're going to probably pick on tarot card reading a lot today as an example of this.
It's a very useful example of this.
And a lot of people understand what we're talking about.
And even if you don't, it's a very simple thing to get, which is probably the reason why it becomes very popular.
But in this situation, you have a tangible thing that's attempting to be related to an intangible thing.
And you're almost using the existence of the tangible thing, in this case, tarot cards, the cards and their arrangement on a table, to build in the mind of an audience member or a person who's having their tarot read the illusion that there's a real thing happening here.
It's like a bridge between a tangible thing, which is the cards, and the intangible thing, which is the additional information that's meant to be interpreted from the arrangement of the cards.
And so as soon as I was thinking about this, I was thinking that, well, maybe this is something like I could call it like pseudo-tangibility, which means that it's not tangible, but it appears to be.
So in this way, it's like you're hijacking a piece of neuroscience in that you're, I mean, most people who came up with tarot didn't know anything about neuroscience, but they probably noticed a pattern in which if they did a real thing and talked about it being associated with an intangible thing, it was easier for people to believe.
Like if you went to a tarot card and they just said they were shuffling the cards in their head and laying them out in an arrangement on their head and they just told you what they were saying, it wouldn't mean anything to anyone.
And no one would go to a tarot card reading ever because they'd be like, where's the cards?
Like, what am I looking at?
There's nothing here.
But because there's a tangible aspect to it, a person starts to, you know, build the structure in their mind and it has a structure.
That structure isn't related to anything real, but it has a structure.
And that's a thing that they, that sticks to them.
So let's get your first take on my idea that there's a pseudo-tangibility happening here and that it's between a tangible item and an intangible item and them being deliberately related to each other.
Yeah.
So I think what you're describing is possibly something that is so fundamental to us as human beings that it is actually part of how we learn and part of how we make sense of the world in every way.
So you're drawing a distinction between mental models.
So correct me if I'm wrong here.
So I'm really relaying back to you what I think you're describing.
So tell me if I've got it wrong.
I think you're saying that there's a sort of mental model that we use to describe what you're saying are tangible things, like a horse, for instance.
Let's say a horse, an animal, it exists in the world as a physical object.
You can interact with this physical object.
As you talked last time, there are our brain processes inputs in the form of electrical signals or the brain converts them into electrical signals and electrochemical impulses and so on and so on.
So we are, but that's all happening in response to something that is physically present in the world.
You're differentiating that with concepts that are not, don't exist as solid objects in the world, such as happiness or being excited about something or trust.
And you're saying that that's a different sort of thing.
And that sometimes we, in order to make concepts or things that are not tangible feel more tangible, we create some sort of physical manifestation of that for us to focus on that helps us make sense of it just as though it's as real as that horse or that car or that lamppost or whatever, whatever it is that we know to be real in the world.
So it actually makes it real for us.
So is that what you're describing?
Is that what you're saying?
Yes, I think, yes, because in the case of tarot cards, the unreal part, the imaginary and magical thinking part, is literally that the person who is arranging everything and doing the tarot reading is going to make some claim.
That's probably something very close to the idea that there's a fundamental interconnectedness to everything in the universe and that therefore, the randomness of the cards can tell you something about events that are outside the room where the cards are laid, and that there can be some meaning from this randomness, that there isn't randomness actually.
Everything has meaning.
Like if you ask someone how like a person who's had their tarot read and believes that it works, if you ask them how it works and you really started to drill down on it, that's sort of the conclusion they would have to come to in order to support their own belief of it.
Because otherwise it's, I mean, the cards I've seen them, they're beautiful.
They have, you know, the artwork is always very well done.
If you ask them if it's possible to do it with just an ordinary deck of playing cards, they would tell you probably absolutely not.
This doesn't have whatever.
And then you ask why they're just as random.
What do the pictures have to do with it?
But somehow, because there's pictures and because someone took the time to make the cards this way and name them this way, this means something.
And the meaning, I think, in that way is all like the meaning that they talk about is all related to their memory of the tangible movements of the cards on the table and their arrangement.
And that they have to imagine the connection between that and the rest of the world.
And that's where, if you're ever going to ask someone about what the meaning was, like how that occurs, that's probably where the magical thinking breaks down: is that they literally have to imagine that the whole universe centers on this room somehow, and there's an individual invisible tendrils from every event to this one.
You can tell what's happening elsewhere right now with these cards and maybe in the future with these cards.
But the fact that the cards exist and they have the arrangement, this is the tangible thing that's the model that's being built in the mind that assists, that builds a bridge from the rational to the imaginary.
And I think that's what I think of when I think of this.
What do you think?
Yeah, so I suppose my I'm just concerned we're not making a mistake here.
So that's why I'm just sort of keeping picking at this.
But I wonder whether what we're getting confused with two different things.
So one element here is the fact that we use symbols to make sense of our worlds.
So one of the most famous child psychologists is Jean Piaget, who describes the, I mean, some of his ideas are quite old now and have been superseded, but he's still the one that everybody goes to.
He's a Swiss psychologist who talks about the development of children.
And from about zero to two, children are completely egocentric in his model.
And I think it's pretty clear that that is the case in the respect that they don't really have a world outside concept.
Everything is their world is themselves.
It's the sensations that are inputs from elsewhere and so on.
But they don't really see themselves as being an individual in a world.
They are the worlds.
And part of the development, well, big part of the development process is that movement away from egocentricity to realizing that they exist in a wider world and that their actions can have effects in that world.
And so the process of that happening is one.
So first of all, he uses the word schemas, which I think is quite an interesting word.
And in some respects, it sounds a bit like the word model.
So he talks about schemas that young children have, the most basic things, such as sucking or, you know, just moving their hands and so on.
These things are done instinctively.
So a baby sucks at anything when it's very, very young.
And then it starts to wreck it or it starts to adapt to the world that it's in.
It doesn't know it's adapting.
It doesn't know that it's preferring to suck at this thing rather than that thing, or that there's some benefit in this thing rather than that thing.
But it starts to respond in a way that it takes note of the world and then starts to bring the world to it, if you like.
So he calls it assimilation.
So this is the idea that the child is assimilating its experiences within itself.
And at some point, it then starts to adapt to the world.
And at that point, it's really starting to understand, understands not quite the right word, but starts to be able to engage in symbolic thought.
And that's the beginning of, I suppose, its ability to make sense of the world.
And so even at that very, very early stage, so then from sort of two to seven or eight or nine, it's starting to learn about symbolic thought.
And obviously, language is a big part of that.
So that's the way that Piaget described it.
And it seems to me that that is a fundamental part of how we develop, whether you describe it in Piaget's terms or others.
It's this process of trying to make sense. of those inputs by accommodating the world outside.
And the only way of doing that is to build schemas or models.
So, you know, the model of, so I, in my thinking about this, I looked at, started thinking about symbolic thought and the, what's it, Lascaux paintings in France, the cave paintings, you know, these are ancient.
These are times when humans didn't have language.
You know, we know nothing about these people, but they are our ancestors.
And they've painted these absolutely extraordinary pictures on caves of horses and buffalo and so on.
It's just absolutely astonishingly beautiful.
And it feels like this is such an ancient thing.
Now, one could say that, okay, well, they're just painting representations of horses or buffalo, but you could also say that they are painting representations of hunting.
And once you get into words like hunting, that's a much more interesting word.
So just to shift gears a moment, I've talked about the idea of constructions and constructing our world.
A good example of this is a party.
So if we say, you know, I'm going to a party or I'm going to have a party or something like that, the word party, it describes something that's happening real in the world.
It's a tangible thing.
There are people meeting together.
But then as soon as you've said that, or once you've said that, you pretty much said as much as you can really say about what that party is going to be like.
You know, does it include people dancing?
Is it in a house?
Does it include alcohol?
Does it include lots of people?
Is it a family?
Is it a wedding party?
Is it, you know, are the people.
So it actually, you can't say very much about it, but it still does conjure up some sort of image in our head.
And that's our attempt to make sense of the world through this symbolic thing that we've decided to make these noises with our mouth that sounds like the word party.
And so as soon as we do that, that's what we think we mean.
But as you said, it's hard to differentiate.
So all of that, why am I getting into all of that?
I'm getting into all of that because I feel that it might be unfair to single out things like tarot or astrology or other types of what we would describe as magical thinking as being fundamentally erroneous just because of that thing, just because of the thing that we're doing when we're doing that.
You wanted to come in on that?
No, no, yeah, that's you're exactly right that we shouldn't single them out in that they are wrong because they're doing this.
Right.
I was coming up with a when I was thinking about this before the episode, I was coming up with examples of times where this was used.
And I was definitely focused first on the magical thinking aspects.
But then it occurred to me rapidly that there's a very more everyday example of this that's completely innocuous and much more general, which is that in every situation where we, oh, every, in many of the situations where we are using metaphors themselves, we are attempting to build this bridge, this pseudo-tangible bridge, where we are comparing.
And I, again, not everyone, but in many cases where we're built, when we're using metaphors, we are comparing a tangible thing to an intangible thing to represent an intangible thing via a tangible item that we could all see so that we can communicate to each other what the intangible thing looks like in our minds.
And that's once I kind of came to that thought, I thought, well, okay, this isn't the case where we have, for example, misled people or grifters perhaps who are attempting to use things like a tarot to just do a terrible thing.
We have them piggybacking on to a general concept that's occurring for all of us.
And that this means, quite literally, that we have to pay attention to it because it's just a thing our mind will do.
As you've pointed out, it's been happening since we first started to make noises.
And it's how it's a big system for how we're going to understand the world, understand each other's view of the world.
And that some people will attempt to use that against us is a part of the world we live in.
It's a sad fact of the world that people take advantage of each other.
And like I say, this is so common that this, I should define this.
I use this way too much when I listen to my podcast back.
I say, what did I mean when I said this?
The idea that people are understanding the world this way via the use of a tangible thing to represent an intangible thing is misused by a great many people to try to mislead us.
And because of that, we need to understand the use of this system in our minds of using a tangible thing as a symbol for an intangible thing.
Because we can't get rid of it, as you've pointed out, it's deep in our software.
The way I put it is it comes installed from the factory and we're always going to have it.
But what we need to do is we need to find a way to understand how it works such that we can then have some level of defense against people who would attempt to use this against us to lay cards on a table to try to tell us that they can tell us something that's happening on the next continent or next week or something.
Because that's the part that will lead people to spend too much money where they should spend it on their bills and that sort of thing.
And you're exactly right that I should land that there.
You're exactly right that this isn't a system where we should only look at the negatives.
We should understand that this is part of us, that this is, and it's not going away.
It's not that you can always avoid this and you need to necessarily separate all the tangible and intangible things into separate categories.
They have to be slurred together this way in order for us to even understand the world and each other.
Yeah, that's that's yeah, I'm glad I'm glad we're of the same mind on that.
I think that's that's right.
Um, it's an old trick, you know, it's a trick we whether it's hardwired into us.
Um, so it does, um, it does almost follow on from our last podcast around the cult bug, if you like, the fact that we have this tendency to be attracted to stories and to heroes and to want to be part of a tribe.
These are, these are fundamental parts of us.
And yeah, it's impossible to change that.
So the same, the same goes for this example.
This is a trick we learned when we were two, you know, to is how we started to be able to operate in the world.
And so we keep playing that trick.
And I suppose a possible way of thinking about it is that, again, that's being hacked by unscrupulous people at times, but it's also the way that we do everything.
Right.
Yeah, there's, I don't know whether I'm jumping ahead.
So by all means, go ahead and jump to shut up.
If it's in your mind.
And it's related?
Absolutely.
So the first thing that I thought when you when you proposed we get into this a bit more was, so I work in organizations and I work with leadership and management teams and so on.
And a big, so HR are often my customers.
So I work with HR teams a lot.
And HR is very interested in psychological models and the use of things like psychometrics.
So for anybody who doesn't know what these are, these are the questionnaires that you fill out that then they basically ask you questions.
And there's different sorts.
We won't get into all the details.
I have talked about them a bit on our podcast in a bit more detail.
But suffice to say that you answer a bunch of questions.
And then these days you feed it into a computer.
It's done on a computer.
And the computer then spits out a profile that describes you.
And there's various different ones that do this.
The most famous one is Myers-Briggs.
There's the DISC model, D-I-S-S-C.
There's SDI?
I can't remember.
There's a whole bunch of them.
And they're all commercial products.
And then there's also some models that have been developed.
I need to be careful with the use of the word model.
We're throwing it around a bit too much.
But there's some systems, let's say, that have been much more statistically developed through proper statistical analysis and thousands and thousands of people and questionnaires that have used factor oral analysis to identify the minimum number of words that you can use to describe particular traits.
And so you can imagine you can describe people in lots of ways.
You know, this person's cheerful, this person's moody, this person's happy-go-lucky.
So what's the difference between cheerful and happy-go-lucky?
And actually, what you're trying to do is reduce the amount of words so you can describe them in as few ways as possible.
And this has been done through factorial analysis.
And you end up with the big five, which is the ones that psychologists use with the acronym OSHAN, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
And so these are the fundamental, according to this system, the fundamental traits that we can describe people.
There's lots of criticism about this, but that's at least there's some, there's been a lot of scientific work done on how to come up with these.
But then you compare that to something like Myers-Briggs, which was this thing that was knocked up by a couple of amateurs, really, which is now universally used in businesses all over the place.
And I just felt that there's a bit of that possibly going on there.
So actually, you know, if as a psychologist I turn up and I say, you know, one of your characteristics is that you seem to be doing this a lot and you seem to be doing that.
This means that you're likely to do this and that and the other.
Then, okay, that's just my opinion.
But if I can present to you a piece of paper that says you are a high D, high I, low S and a high C, and here's what these words mean.
It's printed on a computer printout, then that seems to have a lot more credibility than the descriptors that I've just discussed.
But the question is, is that really true?
And I think it starts to feel quite a lot like astrology, if you're not careful, you know?
So it's always bothered me.
And I've always been very careful when dealing with organizations because they all want this stuff.
And I can help them.
But I'm worried that I don't want to be using a tool that is essentially doing exactly what you just described, that the tarot cards are doing, but dressing it up to sound scientific and to feel like it's got some real deep credibility.
So I think this sort of thing is everywhere.
So that was one of the things that I thought about when you first put that to me.
I'm not quite sure where that fits into our discussion now.
I can't remember where we're up to.
One wonders what it would look like if you did.
And I think now, as of this moment, some PhD and psychologists should do this experiment, attempt to see which would better describe people, Myers-Briggs or astrology, because one of them has to be better at it.
One wonders, right?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
But the problem is that you are.
So, yes, there have been.
So I should just put, I suppose, for legal reasons, a rider on everything I say here.
It's just this is my opinion.
Yeah.
But from the studies that I've done at university and the lectures I've been to and the books that are part of that, there is a strong suggestion that many of these popular systems actually don't have any scientific basis.
Now, that doesn't mean they don't work.
It just means that we don't have scientific evidence that they work.
So we have to be slightly careful.
You know, it is possible that these two people that invented MBTI just happen to have an amazing insight into the world and so on.
But as far as I understand it, there's no good, not sufficient scientific evidence to say that they're any better than sort of chance alone or common sense applications of things.
But again, this is just my opinion.
Others have a different opinion, clearly.
And some people that use it are organizational psychologists and so on.
So, you know, it's not, there are other opinions are available.
But yeah, I have mentioned this in the podcast and I've actually read this.
I don't know if you are aware of the illusionist Derren Brown, whether he reaches across to Canada.
I think I've heard his name mentioned on your podcast, but I think that's the only one.
So he's fairly well, he's very well known in the UK.
He's made some inroads into the US.
He's actually been on Joe Rogan's podcast.
So he's a bit known.
But he's very interesting.
And he's written a kind of, well, he does this trick where he gives these young, all these young people in high school, I think they were undergrads, gives them all like a printout.
First of all, he tells them that he's able to read minds and has this ability to tell what people are like just by something, shaking their hand or looking at them or whatever.
And so he gives them each an envelope which describes in there their personality to them due to his psychic powers in inverted commas.
And they all read it individually and they're like shocked.
They're absolutely amazed that he could get them so right.
You know, just how can he do that?
Yeah.
And then they all open it together or they have a look at each other's and they realize that everybody's is exactly the same.
Yeah, I think I've seen this.
I think I saw a video where the amazing Randy did this once quite a long time ago with astrology.
He claimed he got all the details of each person and then he had it all written out.
They got all their individual thing and then they learned that they just all had the same.
And it's just, it's written in such generic language with knowledge of how humans really kind of think of themselves that everyone kind of personalizes it and thinks of it their own system.
Yeah.
And it's not just, so it would be easier for people to think, oh, yeah, well, we could sort of write very vague things, but it sounds very specific.
You know, like you're the sort of person that, let me think if I can remember some of it, you're the sort of person who can sometimes be very, very confident and appear like they've got everything together, but inside are really struggling with deep held insecurities.
And sometimes you're the life and soul of the party, but other times.
And so these sound very specific, but you know, these are basically describing the human condition.
So, and I used to, I won't say which one, but I used to be recruiting people, partly using some of these systems.
It was part of what the business did.
Lots of businesses do this.
You're not supposed to just use that.
And we didn't.
And we used other things as well as part of the recruitment process.
Hopefully also their relevant experience in the job.
Experience.
Right.
And their studies, obviously, their qualifications.
But it was just part of the mix.
And, but what we did do, which I really do think was good and the right thing to do, was we gave them feedback.
So lots of businesses just get you to fill these things in and you never hear anything again, which is quite unethical, I think.
But we did actually sit with them and say, right, I can see what this is suggesting is, and then we give them the printout.
And they always looked at it and thought, well, that's amazing.
How does it know?
But I can't help but wonder whether there's a lot of what we've what I've just described there.
So my point with this is just that essentially this is doing the same thing.
It's a focal point onto which we can create something that feels and looks tangible, almost scientific, and use it to describe something that is intangible and which is like somebody's personality, for instance.
Right.
Yeah, I think that in the case of things like tarot specifically, but also astrology, tea leaves, palm reading, these are all instances a person reading, you know, attempting to use a crystal ball.
If you went to a person who was meant to see the future and they didn't have a crystal ball when perhaps they should have, it would have a much different effect because it, the image is made that they're looking at something, that something is transmitting the vision to them via a thing that you can't see, but they can.
And you're looking at them looking at it versus whether if they just told you, yes, this will happen, it wouldn't have nearly the same effect.
And I think that, I think I believe anyway, that the crystal ball is just a prop.
And what they're coming up with is a lot of the generic stuff that is said.
These supposed people who are looking into this were attempting this.
But I think in a lot of cases, the thing that causes a person to believe it is a drive to make some sense of what's essentially the chaos in our world.
There's a randomness to our lives to the universe, uh, that until we fully understand everything about quantum mechanics.
And Richard Feynman has assured us we never will, that we will want to see.
I mean, we're always looking for patterns, even where we're told none exist.
And some of us will be deluded into believing that we see patterns that no one else can see or see patterns that are unavailable to anyone else.
So, in this way, it's also possible that a person reading a tarot fully believes that they are reading part of a pattern and that they're not a grifter, they're not consciously ripping anyone off, that they really believe that they're seeing a real thing because there will appear to be patterns there.
Anytime you shuffle a deck and lay them out, if you are looking for the meaning of the universe in there, you can find something because it the cards are there, they're laid there.
There is an order to them, even though that order was determined randomly.
Yeah, and so it's the drive of the mind to try to find that meaning, to try to look for those patterns that is essentially being exploited here by people who are attempting to make money selling people tarot readings and tea leaf readings and whatnot.
I mean, and I think we're, as you said, perhaps even unfairly picking on the people who are claiming to be mediums of some sort, because politicians are also doing this, yes, uh, and perhaps they deserve much more of our enmity and uh grumpiness, if it were.
Not that there's anything we can really do about politicians, but maybe just vote one way or the other.
But there's a lot of people that are attempting to use these things against us, and the best method of defense is to just understand what's happening, to recognize it when it's happening, to see that the cards are being juxtaposed against the randomness of the universe, and that it's that juxtaposition that's fooling you, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think that's that's a good, that's a good uh takeaway from this discussion and and from our previous one, really, which is, um, you know, this is something that this is a way of thinking that is part of us and that we can't change.
So, we have to be aware and we have to know the difference between what appears to be a genuine representation of the world in some way that is telling us something useful and a representation that is not telling us anything useful.
So, and I think part of the so the way I see it for thousands of years, people have tried to make sense of this chaotic world in which we live, and that's why there's always been divination and let's look for the future in the sheep bones.
Or in the Bible, there's the Urim and the Thumim, which is a very interesting thing that the high priest used to carry, which essentially sounds a lot like sort of rolling some dice, really.
Which is interesting because one of the laws was that anybody practicing divination should be stoned to death.
And yet it was part of the priest's.
So that's God trying that.
That's a way to try and find a way to commune with this universal creator or this God who doesn't actually talk to you is to try to interpret something that's happening in the real world to help you to understand what the God is trying to tell you.
So, that's another, this is another representation of that.
Sacrifices, animal sacrifices, as described in the Bible, types and anti-types, the idea that what was happening in history is going to be repeated as a sort of smaller fulfillment of a greater prophecy.
This is inherent in all of our thinking.
So, this has been around a long time.
And then we get science, and science seems to tell us things that are equally unbelievable.
You know, so if you're a, I don't know, I don't really know when germ theory, my history is failing me here, but when germ theory first became something that was really proven, you know, imagine, I don't know, in the 17th century saying that there are, there are very, very, very, very small creatures that are everywhere.
They're everywhere.
These little creatures, they're everywhere.
You can't see them, but they're there.
It would sound like you're a madman.
And then, if you had like a device that could, if you look in this device, you can actually see these little creatures.
And look, this is a this water that I've just got from the pool.
Look, this is the pond there.
Look, this is this is what's in there.
They would, they would exactly describe it as you and I have described it as this is ridiculous.
This is magical thinking.
And you're just tricking me somehow by making it look real, by making me look through this seemingly real device, you know.
So we've, but science has managed to provide evidence.
And that's the thing that I think I wanted to get across in the first discussion that we had on our podcast was that the difference between magical thinking and scientific thinking is that we put to one side any kind of,
or as much as we possibly can, of these human tendencies to make leaps and generalizations that don't really have any actual correlations in the world or relationships in the world.
And we use evidence like statistics or an experiment that we have designed to be able to demonstrate a very tightly framed hypothesis.
And then on the basis of that, we can make some predictions about the next thing and so on.
And so that's, I think that's what I was trying to do.
And I guess I want to do here is to champion the scientific way of thinking because that is the only way we can avoid this trap that we've kind of been we've evolved to fall into.
Yeah, we're not doing science by our nature.
Correct.
We had to consciously develop it.
It was never intuitive.
Intuition was never doing science on its own.
It was never helping us through science.
And that's a, I mean, that's a kind of one of the recurring themes that I talk about on this podcast is that you have to sort of realize what your brain is going to do on its own and the flaws that will come with that.
And then realize the things that you're going to have to consciously think about in order to do properly to because the thing that we, the thing that drives all of our lives is choices and making better choices is the real measure for our for what we do with our lives.
Being born as you and I have been in a in a country that has everything brought to us, we're going to do okay just doing whatever.
So the real measure there is how much we could do with what we have.
What decisions could we make that could be better decisions for not just us, but for everyone else?
And I think that we can make a case for the fact that tarot readings and astrology don't have the predictive power to allow us to use them to make proper choices.
They could easily be fun, and I'm not going to try to take anyone's fun away because there's enough fun ripped from the world already.
But if you're attempting to use them to decide which husband to take or to which stock to purchase or whatever, that's going to inevitably lead to worse conclusions than using the more tangible, real, reliable things that come from science and technology.
And so that's, although there's a lot of probably stocks is a bad marker because no one knows what stocks to pick except for Warren Buffett.
He's not telling anyone stuff.
Yeah, already undermining my own case here.
But well, yeah, I mean, economics is a good choices.
Choices are it.
Choices are everything we have.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was just going to say, economics is another is another question about, you know, do we does that really tell us all that much about the world?
But you can say that about psychology too.
These are, well, these are very new sciences.
And that's part of the difficulty, I think.
You know, we're only just starting to scratch the surface of the way that we think and make sense of the world.
So it's only been around a few hundred years at most, really.
So it's very difficult to know how much we really do know, I think.
But yeah, I agree.
And I think that's a really important takeaway.
It's that.
And I think that's a respectful thing as well.
It's something that I've tried to work on and have become more concerned about over time.
And again, I think I mentioned this in our in Celine and my last podcast, which was that it's easy to become very dismissive of other people and to have your own tribe and want to separate yourself from people with these crazy ideas.
But you know, the way I see it is that they are just again, we are trying to make sense of a complicated and complex world.
It's not surprising that we make mistakes doing that and we all make those mistakes.
But what it seems to me is that at least we should try to make our decisions based on evidence.
And the better evidence, the better, the more confident we can be about making those decisions.
And that isn't about how clever we are.
This is the thing that is really important.
And sometimes scientists and science gets gets a bad rap about this because sometimes scientists can come across a little bit arrogant, but good scientists realize that it's not about how clever they are.
It's about the process of science.
It's about the scientific method.
And that is actually what makes the difference.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Scientists are just like everyone else.
They can be arrogant.
They can be distasteful.
They can be lack social grace.
All of the flaws that I've seen also in people in a blue-collar environment.
It is as far removed from the scientific world as you can be.
But yeah, they're just people.
And that's why we shouldn't rely on the individuals.
We should rely on the process.
It's the process.
It's the method.
It's the method.
So I think maybe we'll try to wrap it up there so that we can have one podcast.
It doesn't go two hours.
Well, people seem to enjoy the last one.
So, although my podcast went on for about an hour and 40 minutes, nobody complained and it did well.
And people said they enjoyed it.
So, yeah, that bodes well, I think.
But yeah, we've probably said everything we need to on this one, I think.