#subjective validation

(Mentioned link. Note: this is for a Geography class. Science is “only a theory”, and geography “has no wrong answers”. Not even literal magic is a wrong answer.)

Standpoint epistemology and ‘lived experience” are just fancy ways of saying “i fE3L iT !N mY h3aRt!1!” They’re narcissistic self-indulgence - “it’s true because I think it’s true” - and synonyms of “faith.”

These myths might be relevant in classes like history, but in the biology and geography classrooms, they’re just simply wrong.

It’s horseshit, and no.

Not only can picture cards not have any fore-knowledge of the world around them, but their vague, non-specific messages and the fact their “meaning” has to be interpreted renders them completely subjective. You see what you want to see. Or worse, the tarot reader tells you what you or they want you to believe. Exactly the same as horoscopes or any other fortune-telling scam.

Which is to say, it’s not a completely worthless practice, because it’s effectively a crude psychological test that can give an insight into the mind of the reader, the one doing the “interpreting” of the random, meaningless pictures - what they think, what they want, how they view themselves or others, their motivations.

By the way, this effect has been studied:

http://skepdic.com/forer.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_validation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/forer-effect.htm

https://curiosity.com/topics/the-barnum-effect-is-why-this-article-knows-exactly-what-kind-of-person-you-are-curiosity/

https://web.randi.org/swift/did-a-psychic-see-my-future-no-it-wasnt-in-the-cards

If it was “true,” someone would have picked up one of the many, many prizes. Belief in them is as much an unfalsifiable “faith”-based belief as any religious idea. Like prayers to “god”, they’re never “wrong”, they’re just telling you something else, or something that will make sense later, or some other excuse to sustain the illusion. How would we detect that tarot isn’t a valid mechanism for figuring out the world around us? Anything at all?

Just for fun:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124543/