Fiverr is a website where all manner of people can offer freelance work to whoever is interested. I was amused to see that they have a category for woo-woo: there is a whole page where you can rent the services of psychics, mind readers, spell casters etc.:
It also appears to be by far the busiest and most lucrative part of the site. I looked through other sections to see if there may be something I could do for extra cash. So there is, for example, a section where you can offer your services as freelance writer for articles or blog posts, and typical writers there charge around $5 for a 500 word article.
Not so with the magicians; they have far more confidence in the value of their services. E.g. check out this bloke:
He reads minds and his cheapest package is $50. He has done thousands of such readings and gets rave reviews too (just scroll down to see his reviews).
I tell you, sometimes the temptation to start a business as psychic becomes almost impossible to resist. I have spent thirty years doing nothing but honest work, and creating honest products and services, and I’m a pauper. I could go register at Fiverr and sell short articles, each of which would probably take about an hour to write, for five dollars a piece, of which Fiverr itself takes 20% in commission. So I’ll end up with some R40 for an hours work, of which half will probably be taken by the government and bank too (I don’t know what, if any, forex transaction fees will be involved!) And I’ll likely not get much work that way anyway; most of the writers there don’t seem to be doing particularly well.
Or: I could become a psychic, charge exorbitant fees and do nothing more than reshuffle standard predictions like Randi did when he worked as newspaper astrologer, and be inundated with more work than I know what to do with.
In the face of this, it is difficult not to conclude that society desperately WANTS to be bamboozled. Should one not just go right ahead and provide them the services they want?
Society just wants to be told that everything is gonna be ok… and that is the sad part about these woo woo preachers… because NOTHING is really ever going to be ok…
Brian - enjoy your peaceful sleep, duping people cant be good for the soul.
It will get to him, and the longer he gets away with it, the harder the fall will be.
I had to laugh: I notice that the spell caster’s ads now appear in my Facebook feed. Once again the artificial intelligences that follow us around on the web misjudged.
The thing is… its rediculously easy to play the psychic game. Im studying again as mentioned earlier this year and in one of my modules came across this guest lecturer who spoke to us about depth facilitation, Jung and co, for those familiar with depth psychology. With the new understanding around neuroscience and brain plasticidity some theories were revisited since the last time I opened a varsity book and I was blown away with the work they are doing with mental illness. What I was gobsmacked at though was how this woman took 12 of us into a room and facilitated a conversation topic from each of us (our choice of topic) and afterwards proceeded to tell us more than we wanted to know about ourselves. I cornered her afterwards and was lucky enough to get a hearty laugh and an invite to spend an afternoon with her.
She is effing good at reading people and listening to people, she gave me a few tips and it bloody works. So nothing mystic, just some really well defined body language and listening skills. Im good at teasing issues out of people but she straight off asks you a question which smacks bullseye to the problem.
Boogie… I’m more and more convinced that it is some kind of gift/curse to be able to think the way we do. One of my colleagues speaks of “intellectually integrated people”, she’s being kind to dumb people when she uses that term to describe critical/enlightened/liberal thinkers/people. There are so few of us…
The magician’s ads are fairly low key and discreet. Much more irritating are the YouTube ads, where I now get the same one over and over and over and over and over, after having made the error to follow up on it once.
I don’t actually mind much that companies track me to work out which ads to pitch at me. It’s just that their technology doesn’t actually work all that well, so they end up irritating me rather than holding my interest.
Privacy Badger, you say… but can we trust anything that comes from the EFF? What else might they install along with the Badger? White Monopoly Capital Tracker?
I saw the other day in a YT comment that people complain about the many ads - apparently YouTube even puts them inside videos, and not just at the beginning. I never saw these because I download videos to watch, and the downloader doesn’t download the ads.
I’m on overkill and use both, not so much to block ads but because of rampant and flagrant privacy invasion. I haven’t seen an ad in years. It did take a bit of fine-tuning not to get redirects on uBlock because of PB. Both of these are ‘clean’ - I check obsessively before I download anything.
If my parents hadn’t spanked me as a child I might have done that Psychic thingo on Fiver and other such platforms >:D It would be so damned easy. One born every minute.
So now we know why there are psychic charlatans on this planet: their parents failed to spank them. Of course, it is not necessarily too late. “Spank the Guru” will make for an interesting TV game show. Or theme for a YouTube channel. You drag the psychics into a game of Brockian ultra-cricket that they never foresaw, and all the predictions stop there and then.
