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Post by Joanna on Sept 13, 2017 22:55:02 GMT -5
Six 'Professions' That Are Full of Crap
People get paid a lot of money to be experts on all sorts of things, so one would assume these individuals are much more knowledgeable than the average Joe or, at the very least, a blindfolded monkey throwing darts. Sadly, in many cases this just isn’t true, and the so called “expertise” in question amounts to little more than a shot in the dark. Following are a list of so-called experts that inspire confidence while, in reality, their predictions are no more accurate that those of a fortune teller:
Stock Market Analyst. Many of us find the stock market too intimidating to put money into, or at least we would if we had the money to invest in the first place. How do you decide what stocks to pick? Half the time, most people have a hard time picking where they’re going to lunch, yet, those people understand lunch ... don’t they? And they don’t hire someone to help them decide ... do they?
So why does someone with a lot of extra money hire someone to tell them which stocks to buy? Why pay someone else to tell you which stocks and bonds and watch your wealth accumulate no faster than if you’d made your purchases based on your astrological chart or chosen them randomly? As it turns out, the majority of professionally-managed funds picked by stock market experts (70 to 85 percent) actually underperform the Dow or Standard & Poor indices, which are technically supposed to represent the average performance of the market to begin with.
But if you do have to peddle your nest egg off to someone else, try to hand it to Warren Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway stocks outperformed the index by 11.14 percent on average for more than 30 years. It’s not that financial advisors cannot know what to pick, they usually just don’t. Nevertheless, when going up against a bunch of dudes throwing darts at a chart to randomly pick their stocks, the stock professionals performed better – though barely.
Wine Taster. One thing we all can be sure about is that people who make their living writing about wine must be able to sniff out differences between wines much better than plain ordinary folk. Sure, Joe Consumer usually prefers cheaper wines, but that’s because Joe Consumer is an uncultured plebeian. The experts, on the other hand, can tell the difference between a 2006 and 2007 Stag;s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon in their sleep because everyone knows 2006 was a pedestrian year for Napa Valley reds – but they don’t.
Hell, the experts have such discerning pallets they can tell the difference between two bottles of the same wine. In one experiment, wine experts were given two bottles of the same wine, only one was labeled a “vin de table” (France’s version of “Night Train”) and the other was labeled a “grand cru” (top-rated vineyard since 1855). Want to know what happened? According to the report: “Whereas the tasters found the wine from the first bottle ‘simple,’ ‘unbalanced,’ and ‘weak,’ they found the wine from the second ‘complex,’ ‘balance,’ and ‘full.’” The participants’ tasting skills put to shame and it didn’t even occur to them that nobody buys a $40-plus bottle of wine for a university experiment. Not only can professional wine tasters be convinced the same bottle of wine was both award-winning and hobo juice, but they could even be convinced the same bottle was both red and white with the cunning use of food coloring.
This is not to say the whole idea of wine-tasting is a crock – it just seems to be a field in which a profession that depends on the tongue allows the eyes to make the decision. For example, in a blind test during the 1976 Judgment of Paris, French experts picked American wines as superior to their own, recoiling in horror when they found out.
Art Critic. Despite its being the battle cry of the bad artist, it really is true that art is subjective. so while we don’t expect art critics to be able to tell us which art is the “best,” we do expect them to at least be able to tell the difference between a Van Gogh and a Picasso, or a Vermeer and a Gary Larson. The good news is that one of these expectations is correct.
Hans van Meegeren was an ordinary mild-mannered artist in the 1930s who painted unimpressive portraits until one day an art critic called him “unoriginal.” Determined to deliver the most ferocious professional scrotum kick in history, Meegeren hatched a daring plan to paint a completely new painting in the style of the artist Vermeer and when all the critics fawned over the newly discovered Vermeer, he would expose them all as the fools they were. Sure enough, his knock-off was hailed by critics as a Vermeer masterpiece, sold for the modern equivalent of $6-million and featured as the centerpiece of a prestigious gallery exhibition. Van Meegeren, realizing he liked money, ditched the plan to embarrass the critics and began painting more Vermeers. Following World War II, Meergeren was arrested for selling “stolen” Vermeers to the Nazis and was forced to admit he had painted them himself.
In 1964, Swedish art critics were fooled into praising the modern works of Pierre Brassau with descriptions such as “Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.” Actually, Brassau “preferred eating the paint to placing it on a canvas” because Brassau was a freaking chimpanzee!
Criminal Profiler. We’ve all learned from TV and movies that when a serial killer is on the loose, an attractive (or handsome) outside expert can come in and discover an intimate window into the killer’s mind by examining the very pattern of his knife strokes. How does a profiler pull off this magic? According to some studies, he/she doesn’t. After analyzing studies on criminal profiling accuracy, the researchers concluded that professional profilers are no more accurate in their predictions than those in a control group who utilized nothing more than common sense and educated guesses. Additionally, many profilers refuse to participate in any sort of study to verify their accuracy.
As elusive as they are to study, it’s difficult to gauge the accuracy of criminal profilers, though some are certainly more incompetent than others. For example, the FBI profilers searching for the Unabomber identified the suspect as a married man living in the suburbs who was most likely an airplane mechanic. When he was finally arrested in 1996, the Unabomber, Theodore John Kaczynski, turned out to be a wild-haired, crazy mountain man who had been living in a remote cabin for the past 25 years.
Many self-proclaimed criminal profilers scrambled for a place in the spotlight during the Washington Beltway sniper attacks and pegged the randomly murdering snipers as two white men with FBI Profiler Clifton Van Zandt saying, “This is something white males do.” They all scrambled for the shadows when John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, two black men, were arrested and ultimately convicted for the killings.
Weather Forecasters. While it’s long been a running joke that TV weather forecasters are hired for their good looks or entertainment value, most people assume that someone in the back room is feeding them accurate information so they can at least read the weather.
A bored and curious gentleman in Kansas City with a penchant for statistical analysis decided to explore this assumption one day. He tracked the predictions of four local stations for a period of 220 days and found the four stations had about an 85 percent success rate in predicting if it would rain the following day, which looks pretty good at first glance. But consider this: it doesn’t rain on most days, so it’s not a 50/50 thing. In most parts of the country, it rains only about 14 percent of days. Okay, suppose you went on the air and consistently predicted it wouldn’t rain. In 220-day period, you’d beat their average accuracy rate because your “it won’t rain” prediction is right 86.3 percent of the time. In the study, two of the four stations barely beat you with 87 percent correct, while the other two fell below the threshold.
The study then narrowed it to debatable days only, eliminating days when it clearly wasn’t going to rain – basically boiling it down to days people would actually care about the forecast. The man lowered his threshold to 50 percent, the equivalent of flipping a coin when it’s cloudy to predict whether it will rain tomorrow, and again, the TV stations barely managed to defeat the inanimate object, ranging between 50 percent and 60 percent accuracy. By the time the test was adjusted to predict the weather three days in the future, the coin was winning all the time.
With all this said, this guy’s conclusion isn’t that meteorology is untrustworthy, but rather that local TV weather forecasting places too much emphasis on good hair and bad jokes and not enough on smaller details, such as when it’s going to rain.
Sportswriter. Millions of guys would love to spend all their time watching games and telling people their opinions about sports, but only a select few get to do it and they do so primarily by keeping up a pretense of having some exclusive knowledge about the game. Any sports fan will tell you their hometown sports columnist is a retarded hack, but sports fans tend to be just as lazy as they are abusive and not many compile a statistical analysis of their hated sportswriters’ inaccuracies.
One man, however, did take it upon himself to prove the point empirically in 1971 with an actual study on the ability of sportswriters to predict college and NFL games. Their success rate was .476, which you may notice is slightly worse than a coin and the coin’s writing ability is arguably superior.
However, before writing sports journalists off as complete morons, keep in mind that even Accuscore – a service that charges for its sports predictions based on complex computer algorithms that crunch stats and predict trends – claims no more than 53 to 54 percent accuracy, which is still enough to make money for its customers. So, sports prediction is something almost nobody can get a handle on, but still ... worse than a coin toss?
If you want to tie your brain in a knot, think about this: If those guys sitting behind the desk at ESPN are performing worse than chance when they make an “expert” judgment about who’s going to win the game, this means they could improve their accuracy by always betting on the team they actually believe is going to lose. In fact, some of them are wrong so often they could beat the Accuscore service simply by going against their instincts every time. Of course, they’d still probably screw it up somehow.
Sources: Christina H, Cracked, January 27, 2010; “The Sham of Criminal Profiling” by Bruce Schneider, November 14, 2007; “Weather.com Kills the Weather Channel’s Credibility” by Dennis Mersereau, February 27, 2015; and “90% of Everything is Crap” by Paul Goodwin, October 2, 2015.
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Post by natalie on Sept 22, 2017 10:53:34 GMT -5
Well, most art critics and art dealers cannot tell the difference between a real piece of art and a replica, half the time. Art theft has been going on for decades and some of the replicas are incredibly accurate and are not found to be replicas for a long time, and millions of dollars later. I wonder if this is also true for appraisers who claim that an article of clothing belonged to a celebrity, and that the article of clothing is authentic not a duplicate or replica. This would also apply to things like hair brushes, pieces of hair, etc., that are supposedly a celebrity's. How exactly do you prove that?
My friend would also say that chiropractors are quacks and should be on this list, as well as a majority of psychics. How do you feel about psychics? I feel some of them may have psychic abilities to some degree. I have been able to predict what a friend of mine is thinking before he could open his mouth, have responded to someone's question before they could even open their mouth to ask and are surprised that I knew what they were about to ask, and have called my mother as she was picking up the receiver to dial me -- things like that. I am not sure if that's being a psychic or if it's more of a question of telepathy. I also watch a lot of crime shows and have seen that sometimes, the psychic predicted the missing person was dead and would be found next to a body of water, and it has been true. Police departments use them at times too, do you agree that they can be helpful at times, or do they just happen to get lucky?
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Post by jason on Sept 22, 2017 14:26:52 GMT -5
Well, most art critics and art dealers cannot tell the difference between a real piece of art and a replica, half the time. Art theft has been going on for decades and some of the replicas are incredibly accurate and are not found to be replicas for a long time, and millions of dollars later. I wonder if this is also true for appraisers who claim that an article of clothing belonged to a celebrity, and that the article of clothing is authentic not a duplicate or replica. This would also apply to things like hair brushes, pieces of hair, etc., that are supposedly a celebrity's. How exactly do you prove that? My friend would also say that chiropractors are quacks and should be on this list, as well as a majority of psychics. How do you feel about psychics? I feel some of them may have psychic abilities to some degree. I have been able to predict what a friend of mine is thinking before he could open his mouth, have responded to someone's question before they could even open their mouth to ask and are surprised that I knew what they were about to ask, and have called my mother as she was picking up the receiver to dial me -- things like that. I am not sure if that's being a psychic or if it's more of a question of telepathy. I also watch a lot of crime shows and have seen that sometimes, the psychic predicted the missing person was dead and would be found next to a body of water, and it has been true. Police departments use them at times too, do you agree that they can be helpful at times, or do they just happen to get lucky?
If chiropractors stick with what they're supposed to do -- cracking necks and backs -- they're fine and serve a useful purpose. If they get involved in other things such as specializing in treating people injured in accidents, holistic medicine, homeopathy, or whatever, they turn into quacks.
We all know psychics are scam artists. The article is about actual professions, like criminal profilers, who are no more accurate than psychics.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2018 20:49:48 GMT -5
Two men see a skinny, starving child.
One says, "Hey, that kid's hungry?"
The other guy says, "How do you know? Are you psychic?"
"No!" says the first guy. "I'm a criminal profiler!"
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2018 21:17:55 GMT -5
Actually Coin Tosses are only 50-50 on 50 coin tosses about 8 % of the time. The likelihood gets closer to 50-50 as you keep tossing but 50 tosses is probably closer to 60-40 and I don't know how many games the sports writers were asked to call. Much less than 50. I'd say. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1928xb/if_i_flip_a_coin_100_times_what_are_the_chances_i/
So 47.6% would actually be better than a coin toss on 20 chances or so. Coins would get that score or more less than 8% of the time. So the writers are doing pretty good. [P.S. If they can do it more than 12 times in a hundred.]
Not that I'm defending sports writers or their writing ability. Actually they're too good at writing. I never trust a good writer. Like whoever wrote the above article.
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Post by pat on Jan 11, 2018 4:06:26 GMT -5
Not that I'm defending sports writers or their writing ability. Actually they're too good at writing. I never trust a good writer. Like whoever wrote the above article. There are several sources and that means that Joanna wrote it. If someone else had written it, there would be just the one source. Lee and Joanna write all of the articles unless they are taken from a single source. I think that Jason may have also written a couple of articles, but what he writes is usually satire.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 11, 2018 10:24:07 GMT -5
Sorry if I offended the author whether it's Joanna or Christina H. It's just rule of thumb I go by after years of reading books on unsolved mysteries by various authors. I rate two or three highly when it comes to their treatment of the subject matter.
It's only logical. Again going by the odds, good writers would make up maybe 5% of any group or field of study. Odds are that the best one's in any field are in the 95% who aren't great writers.
I also find their interest in a topic comes and goes. It comes when their writing about it and then it goes.
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Post by jason on Jan 11, 2018 17:39:21 GMT -5
Sorry if I offended the author whether it's Joanna or Christina H. It's just rule of thumb I go by after years of reading books on unsolved mysteries by various authors. I rate two or three highly when it comes to their treatment of the subject matter.
It's only logical. Again going by the odds, good writers would make up maybe 5% of any group or field of study. Odds are that the best one's in any field are in the 95% who aren't great writers.
I also find their interest in a topic comes and goes. It comes when their writing about it and then it goes.
Christina H. wrote the article. The other sources indicate that Joanna added to or changed some things in the original article.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 12, 2018 0:15:23 GMT -5
If serial killers were professional athletes and profilers were sports reporters:
Profiler: So Wayne, help me to understand your mind!
Serial Killer: Well I take it one murder at a time, and I give it 110 percent, and I like to step it up every time and get to the next level and you really got to want it and there's no love lost, that's for sure.
Profiler: Thank you. You've been so helpful. Can I quote you in my next book?
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Post by madeline on Jan 12, 2018 0:29:40 GMT -5
If serial killers were professional athletes and profilers were sports reporters:
Profiler: So Wayne, help me to understand your mind!
Serial Killer: Well I take it one murder at a time, and I give it 110 percent, and I like to step it up every time and get to the next level and you really got to want it and there's no love lost, that's for sure.
Profiler: Thank you. You've been so helpful. Can I quote you in my next book? So you don't have a high opinion of criminal profilers either. Most people that I've encountered online -- except in this group -- seem to think that criminal profilers are actual scientists.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 12, 2018 14:56:56 GMT -5
No I consider profiling to be a legitimate science. I just don't believe you have to go interview murderers in prison.
For the most part, they are not very insightful about criminal behavior although there are some good ones like Kemper. They do know about modus operandi. And that is helpful. But MO is usually a variable practical thing unrelated to the invariable psychological makeup of the person.
P.S. There do seem to be a lot of skeptics here. But sometimes I believe skeptics are the true believers. And the Believers are unbelievers.
If a scientist sees an explosion, can't he guess as to the chemical reaction that went on and what is the "profile" of the unknown elements that were used. If he's wrong about the exact element, does anyone say "Oh what he does is not science!"
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Post by Sam on Jan 14, 2018 8:34:48 GMT -5
No I consider profiling to be a legitimate science. I just don't believe you have to go interview murderers in prison.
For the most part, they are not very insightful about criminal behavior although there are some good ones like Kemper. They do know about modus operandi. And that is helpful. But MO is usually a variable practical thing unrelated to the invariable psychological makeup of the person.
P.S. There do seem to be a lot of skeptics here. But sometimes I believe skeptics are the true believers. And the Believers are unbelievers.
If a scientist sees an explosion, can't he guess as to the chemical reaction that went on and what is the "profile" of the unknown elements that were used. If he's wrong about the exact element, does anyone say "Oh what he does is not science!"
We had another group on Yahoo before this one and we had a discussion once about psychiatry. Lee and some of the others, Jason and Catherine, I think, said that psychiatry is an art, not a science, because mental illness is relative, or open to interpretation, or something like that. I can't explain it, but what they said made a lot of sense. Maybe one of them will explain it because I'd like to see what they said again. I tried to find the discussion in the old group to copy and paste it here, but the Yahoo search feature doesn't work anymore.
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Post by steve on Jan 14, 2018 19:00:11 GMT -5
We had another group on Yahoo before this one and we had a discussion once about psychiatry. Lee and some of the others, Jason and Catherine, I think, said that psychiatry is an art, not a science, because mental illness is relative, or open to interpretation, or something like that. I can't explain it, but what they said made a lot of sense. Maybe one of them will explain it because I'd like to see what they said again. I tried to find the discussion in the old group to copy and paste it here, but the Yahoo search feature doesn't work anymore. I don't remember that discussion, but I have heard that psychiatry isn't a science. I can understand why people say that because a mental health diagnosis is a matter of opinion that can't be confirmed by lab results, x-rays or other diagnostic tests.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 15, 2018 18:34:16 GMT -5
There's all kinds of profiling - Crime scene profiling telling you if it was planned or if the perpetrator knew the victim because of overkill or making the dead person "comfortable". If they write letters, there's idiolectics or regional idiosyncratic profiling. These are like fingerprinting.
I don't understand why skeptics are trying to debunk profiling when it's based on the crime scene or dump sites. If a profiler says the Alaskan Serial killer is a business man and a pilot, is that psychological or just plain old fashion deduction or common sense because of the dump sites?
What psychology there is in FBI profiling is actually an advancement on modern psychology. And it was done mostly by headbanger agents. Now even "psychology" doesn't even like it.
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Post by Sam on Jan 15, 2018 22:50:33 GMT -5
There's all kinds of profiling - Crime scene profiling telling you if it was planned or if the perpetrator knew the victim because of overkill or making the dead person "comfortable". If they write letters, there's idiolectics or regional idiosyncratic profiling. These are like fingerprinting.
I don't understand why skeptics are trying to debunk profiling when it's based on the crime scene or dump sites. If a profiler says the Alaskan Serial killer is a business man and a pilot, is that psychological or just plain old fashion deduction or common sense because of the dump sites?
What psychology there is in FBI profiling is actually an advancement on modern psychology. And it was done mostly by headbanger agents. Now even "psychology" doesn't even like it.
Crime scene profiling is also wrong a lot of the time. When a victim is stabbed numerous times as if the killer was in a frenzy, I've found that profilers often say that means the killing is personal, that the killer knew the victim. But that's not always the case and I've found that it usually isn't the case unless the perp was extremely angry at the time of the murder and just lost it. The reason that I say this is because sometimes when a person starts stabbing someone or hitting someone with a heavy object, he loses it and can't quit, so he just keeps stabbing or hitting until the victim is a bloody mess. Pat said something about that in the Homicidal Triad discussion when she posted something about Rod Ferrell, the one they called the "vampire killer". whatliesbeyond.boards.net/thread/1076/homicidal-triad-violence-indicator-urban?page=3
Ferrell was from here in Kentucky, but about 400 miles from where I live on the other side of the state. I'm in Appalachia, in eastern Kentucky. Ferrell has told people that once he started hitting his victims that it gave him a thrill and he couldn't stop so he just kept on hitting. He's now in prison in Florida. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted, but I don't know why.
I think that one reason that you're finding a lot of people in this group disagreeing with you about profiling is that a lot of people just don't trust the mental health field and that's because shrinks make so many mistakes, like saying that someone who has committed murder and gets sent to an asylum is cured and then the person is released and kills again. I remember one woman that Lee or Joanna told us about in the old group who drowned her three children and was sent to a mental hospital. Finally, the doctors said that she was cured and released her and she had three more children and drowned them when they were about the same age as the first three. I can't remember her name, but I think that it happened in Maine.
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