The Clouded Crystal Ball: A Psychic and Her Employees
The New Yorker used to have a mini-department called The Clouded Crystal Ball: examples of bad predictions taken from “newsbreaks” — little bits of text used to fill a column. In an interview, a friend of mine named Margaret Meklin told of a different sort of clouded crystal ball:
My first job in the U.S. was passing out flyers for a fortune teller on Powell and Market in San Francisco. She did not trust her psychic powers enough to guess who was doing a truly good job (it was me!), so she would periodically hide in the tourist crowds to check if we were passing out flyers quickly and efficiently and to a sufficient number of passersby. She gave a higher pay rate to my co-worker, thinking that he was more productive, but she had no idea that he would simply toss a whole stack of flyers into a trash can when she wasn’t watching him.
February 4th, 2013 at 9:54 pm
This post is a fragment of poetic perfection, thanks Seth.
February 4th, 2013 at 10:00 pm
I’ve gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been
told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman
getting ready to arrest her.
– New York City detective
February 5th, 2013 at 1:52 pm
Is fortune-telling illegal in New York?
February 5th, 2013 at 2:24 pm
It’s all about data and how to unhide them.
Barry Ritholz has a post on a new site to track financial pundits:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/02/pundit-tracker/
February 6th, 2013 at 1:21 am
Ahoy, Seth. Steve Sailer (the most interesting journalist in the US?) has just blogged a piece on “priming” in social psychology: another case of phoney science?
February 6th, 2013 at 1:21 am
Ahoy, Seth. Steve Sailer (the most interesting journalist in the US?) has just blogged a piece on “priming” in social psychology: another case of phoney science?
February 6th, 2013 at 8:52 am
Ahoy again, Seth. Cardiobrief has linked to this diet paper.
http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.e8707
February 12th, 2013 at 5:28 pm
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