I'm gonna meander a bit, I'm neutro spicy and I feel like the context here is important.
My dad was smart. Not in the grade school, my dad is stronger then yours kinda smart, but genuinely usually one of the smartest people in the room. His friends and co-workers thought so, my mother thought so. He was unique in his ability to both think through complicated problems and put his ideas in to action in a way that I haven't seen from anyone else.
Between my sister and I, I feel like she got most of his talent. That is to say, my sister is also quite smart, and driven. She's made herself a 1%er. But when she was still working hard she was at one time a criminologist, and later an actual, bone fide scientist. People would fight and clamour for positions that came to her naturally. She later moved on to sales and is making a killing, and yet somehow not enough.
She at one time considered herself a feminist. But now, she's a lockstep 1%er. She supports money, and those that make the number go up. She works from home, could live anywhere in the world, and chooses an expensive mcmansion on the East Coast. She railed against Biden and Harris, claims to have voted for libertarians in both elections. Not that it mattered, the state she lives in is so reliably blue it's hard to be mad about her little protest vote. Regardless, it feels like she's been standing at the deep end for a while, and now, I think she's finally taken the plunge. No lifeguard on duty.
She's started seeing a psychic. That, in and of itself is harmless. I've done these things. It can be a fun little game where you walk away and go "that was weird." But my sister, the former scientist, the one blessed with the capacity for reason and action our father had, absolutely the smarter of the two between us, has bought in.
This 'psychic' did what all these people do. Made some pretty general statements that would happen to anybody and gave them some context to make them feel personal. I imagine this psychic has given the exact same spiel about disasters and uncertainty to dozens of clients.
But to my sister, it's real, she's shook. A woman who has received more than one round of applause for testimony before a grand jury because she was just that sharp when answering questions on criminology, a woman who left that field because it wasn't scientific, it wasn't rigorous enough, thinks some random woman she met can suck information from the future.
It's cold reading. Anyone who knows what cold reading is and reads this knows that. It's a stupid Carney trick that anyone can learn to do. It's a single step more advanced than writing horoscopes. Suggesting that confirmation bias might be at play here was met with fervent defiance. My sister is saying she won't dismiss what she doesn't understand.
Bitch. Then SEEK TO UNDERSTAND. By what mechanism is a psychic reading your future? How is that information traveling? The two of you in that room were both genetically human, so surely if she can interpret magic signals from the great unknowable void, anyone can right?
She refuses to ask these questions. She's just taking it on blind faith that this person is being honest, that she can actually see the future, but only kinda, you know in a real vague way, and that guessing correctly about a few everyday things is evidence enough of that.
I've seen her when she gets inquisitive. A question she can't answer drives her to a level of focus and determination you don't often see in people. But it's like that spark is just, gone. The pilot light went out at some point in the last 12 years.
I don't know when we lost her, but that woman is just, gone.
"the first thing to do is to raise hell. That's always the first thing to do when you're faced with an injustice and feel powerless."
-'Mother' Jones.
-Michael Scott