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Sometime ago I uploaded a book which shows you how test whether you have psychic ability. At the end of the chapter on precognition the author offers some common sense arguments on why it's reasonable to believe that precognition is baloney.
Interestingly, one would think that if precognition were a consistent or at least large effect then real life experiments of the type outlined above would be carried out each and every day by those individuals that possess precognitive talents. Imagine, for example, you have these psychic abilities. What would you do with them? For example, would you try to divine the upcoming lottery numbers? Or predict which stock will be the next to rise? Or say which team will win the next world series? There would be nothing stopping you from placing a few bets, bets with no risk because you know what the outcome will be. So what is stop anyone with this kind of ability from using it in such a way that they accumulate both power and wealth? Nothing. If precognition exists there should be a group of people who are exceptionally powerful and wealthy (the power and wealth, of course, accumulated through their precognitive abilities).
They would have no need to hide their powers either because they could dodge any potential threat to themselves by looking into the future and then avoiding it. That we don’t see such groups of powerful people can be described by what is known as the Planned Relent effect. This theory explains what the world would — and should — look like if people genuinely had precognitive powers. The absence of such indicators, classes of extraordinarily powerful psychic sages, seems to be strong evidence against the idea that precognition works, at least at the large scale.
It could be argued that precognition is a small effect and not always reliable or accurate and that this deviation from certainty accounts for the lack of groups of powerful psychics. But this doesn’t work because a person with precognitive powers would still come out ahead on bets in the long run even though their abilities didn’t always work.
A perfect analogy to this are casinos. Some games only have a slight edge,maybe as low as 1% or even lower. This slight advantage in the probability of the house win- ning accounts for the fact that casinos rake in billions each year. The same would hold true for imperfect precognitive bets. The psychic
would still come out ahead in the end. It may take a little longer, but it would still happen.
Arguments that people who have precognitive abilities can only use them for the greater good do not carry any weight. Such limitations on psychic powers would have to be built into the relevant explanatory biological and physical models. It also means defining precisely what “the greater good” means (greater to whom?). That psychics could never use their powers for personal gain and can only use them altruistically (say, to warn of danger) goes against all history of human behavior. The altruism only argument fails on two counts. The first is that if people could only do good with their abilities we
would not have anyone else die in airplane crashes, say, or by driving off bridges. These unfortunate potential accident victims would have been warned of their impending doom and destruction by beneficent seers. Clearly this is not happening. Yes, there are lots of anecdotes to say that it does, but none rigorously confirmed. One would think that some sort of government bureau would have been set up by now, employing precognitive psychics, whose function would be to issue disaster reports much like weather forecasts warn against tornados and hurricanes.
The second reason the altruism argument doesn’t work is human nature. For example, I’m telling you that if I had precognitive powers I certainly would use them for personal gain. I’d pile up a lottery win or two, use the money to make a fortune on the stock market and then begin to accumulate political power. It’d be Emperor William the First before long. And I’m generally a nice guy. There would have to be people who, if capable, would be far more ruthless in the exercise of their abilities than me. Since we don’t see these kinds of things, it follows that any precognitive powers must be negligible or non existent.
Nevertheless, the allure of even the hint of having this ability is strong so reliable tests, like those given here, are essential. To this date no test like these have ever been convincingly passed.
So, You Think You're Psychic? William M. Briggs, 2006
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