Pyschic schmychic

What do you do when friends pay money to see a 'psychic'? Do you spend time trying to convince them otherwise or do you just accept it and try and explain some of the hits afterwards?

I had often thought about this in the past and had always come down on the side of the former. Then I actually got some friends who paid money to see one and now I'm in the latter.

In fact, I'm now almost past the latter to the stage where I'm not even going to try and explain it because it turns out it doesn't actually matter what anyone else thinks.

And it's not like these people are unintelligent - they're not. These are clever people with good jobs, but seem willing to believe that someone who can make some educated guesses about them is able to see the future or talk to dead people.

The thing that got me (and led to a fair proportion of time speaking about it) was the disclaimer the 'psychic' gave up front - to paraphrase, 'this reading is accurate for today but you may make decisions in the future which will alter this and threfore you cannot come back to me and say this didn't come true'.

To an open-minded person I would have thought this would have raised a massive warning flag - and I like to think my friends are pretty open-minded. But no, this was accepted without question.

This so-called psychic just gave themselves the biggest out in the world and yet neither of my friends even considered this as a bad thing.

And then we got onto the hits - those things which were apparently so accurate that only someone who had special abilities would be able to know them. And yes, some good guesses were apparently made - but nothing beyond the bounds of some decent cold reading and a little research.

So I moved on and asked about things that didn't make sense. One of my friends said the 'psychic' had mentioned a name which didn't mean anything. I thought this would surely raise the alarm bells.

Nope, how wrong could I be. This just meant the person might not have come into their lives at this point, or maybe it was a reference to a family member they weren't aware of. Just great.

So, with tail firmly between my legs, I gave it one last shot. Both still have tapes of their visit to the 'psychic'.

I asked them to listen to the tape with a piece of paper in their hands and to mark all the things that were accurate and could apply only to them, things which were accurate which could apply to lots of other people and things which were inaccurate.

I'm figuring it's never going to be done.

So what do you do if a friend tells you they're going to see a 'psychic'? As much as it grates and goes against everything I stand for, in the future (at least with these friends) I might just bite my tongue.