Would It Be Ok to Take a Friend Along to My Psychic Reading

Here at FiveThirtyEight, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to predict stuff. The science of prediction is pretty hard to get right consistently. But in keeping with the philosophy of exploring other schools of predictive idea, I decided to go to one of the classic sources of predictions — a tarot carte du jour reader — to find out what she had to say about the time to come, and how those predictions would stack up against rigorous statistical analysis.

Starting time, let me come clean: Getting your tarot cards read is really, really fun. My reader, who goes by Angela Lucy,¹ has been practicing for more 20 years. Her place of business is a kitchen table in an flat near Union Foursquare in Manhattan. I paid via PayPal half an hr before my reading; Lucy operates by engagement only. According to her business card, the readings are "for entertainment purposes only" — a state law, designed to target unscrupulous mediums, requires this caveat — and they imbue the therapeutic aspects of talking about stuff that's bothering you with the mystical trappings of supernatural forces.

I had 4 readings done: nearly dating, my chore, my friends and a more general ane. I got two kinds of testable statements from them: inferences most who I am — my past and present — and forecasts about my future.² Allow's await at what's allegedly in shop for me, and what the stats accept to say almost those predictions.³

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Dating

You desire someone who'south confident and stable. You lot've been taking some chances just they oasis't worked out. Fifty-fifty though y'all're looking, you're non going to succeed this summertime. People around you retrieve you lot're pitiful and think you need someone. Your friends all think you're solitary.

So at that place's a whole lot to unpack. My state of affairs seems pretty grim. According to the tarot card draw, I've recently failed at a relationship,^iv I'll proceed to fail for the foreseeable future,^five and my friends know information technology and think I'm miserable.⁶ And while it's non exactly a attain to suppose I'thousand looking for someone who'due south stable — who knows, perhaps I'm not by that phase where I seek out an emotionally parasitic organisation that leaves everyone involved bitter and damaged indefinitely — seeking out a confident person is a pretty good bet.

According to a 2014 paper published in the Universal Journal of Psychology, the most desired feature of a romantic partner amongst both men and women is "loyalty," which is a pretty reasonable stand-in for stability in a relationship. Going further back, a 2000 paper from the Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality establish that honesty and trustworthiness — qualities that underpin "stability" — were the attributes college students nearly sought in their romantic partners. And while "confidence" wasn't looked at explicitly, we can see a few features of conviction amid the most desirable attributes, such as existence "friendly and sociable," being "expressive and open" and having an "exciting personality."

What well-nigh the tarot reader's inferences of my recent and hereafter dating failure? In Feb, Mike Develin of the Facebook data team analyzed the rates of relationship formation in major American cities. Among the height 50 population centers in the U.S., New York (the metro where I live) ranked third — behind Detroit and Los Angeles — in the percent of people who were single. New York also had the third-worst relationship formation rate, behind only San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

A New York psychic can probably go a lot of wins by guessing that a single person who sits down at the table has had some dating problem, since the city is full of single people and boasts an abysmal relationship formation rate. On the other paw, tarot card readers in Memphis or Milwaukee tin probably exist a little bit more bullish on the relationship forepart, since in that location's a substantially higher rate of new relationships in those cities. A reader in Salt Lake City or Colorado Springs could near certainly tell her subject some good news.

I was as well curious most how confident Lucy could be in her prediction that I would neglect on the dating front for the foreseeable time to come. She said that I'd have a lot of piece of work with no reward at least until the end of the summer, but I may accept luck around Christmastime. I had my reading on Aug. four, and summer'due south washed Sept. 21. And then she was basically maxim I wouldn't be in a relationship in the adjacent fifty days, but maybe I'd find someone between day 115 and 24-hour interval 143. What are the odds I'd show her wrong?

I emailed Christian Rudder, i of the founders of the online dating site OKCupid, who said it takes the typical person 198 days from joining the site to leaving because he or she finds someone.⁷ (There'south an of import caveat here: Rudder cited the median fourth dimension between a person's join date and his or her nigh recent quit appointment, which matters because xiv per centum of the time people exit and come back.) This number overestimates the time it takes to detect someone, but it's enough to validate Lucy's forecast: I probably won't find someone in the next 50 days, and I might not until afterwards Christmas, either.

Finally, permit's dive into the whole friends thinking I'm miserable thing. That prediction kicked off a whole fix of worries, more often than not because nobody wants to think that his friends retrieve he's miserable.

So I decided to ask them. I sent out a quick survey to my friends, request how strongly they agreed with various statements about my emotional and occupational states — sad, angry, successful, happy, lonely — and 15 responded. They mostly disagreed that I was lamentable, by and large agreed that I was happy, and were surprisingly split on whether I was lonely.⁸

The moral of the story is that everyone should transport a survey to their friends because they volition probably experience pretty good afterwards.

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Work

You lot're not completely comfortable at work. Y'all're new there. And y'all're already wondering if you want to leave.

Wow, this is bad-mannered.

We tin find a lot of data nearly workers' satisfaction, how much time people in different age brackets have spent on the task, and the pct of millennials who are ready to leave their current gigs.

And then how do we figure out how many reporters like me are "completely comfortable" with their piece of work? A 2007 newspaper from Tom Westward. Smith of the Academy of Chicago found 52.nine per centum of editors and reporters were "very satisfied" with their jobs, which means the remainder were not. This puts Lucy's estimation that I'm not completely comfortable at about 50-50. The paper looked at 198 job categories, and ranked them in terms of job satisfaction. Here are the top and lesser v:

Some 35.7 per centum of reporters and editors considered themselves "very happy" overall. This puts my profession essentially in the middle of the pack when compared to the rest of the workforce — somewhere betwixt the 50th and 60th percentile according to the study. So all things considered, reporters take it pretty practiced.

I am new hither, and Lucy's prediction is a sensible one given my historic period. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has lots of information on chore tenure. A report from January 2012 showed that about half of 20- to 24-yr-olds had been in their jobs for 12 months or less (I'yard 23). The median tenure was 1.3 years in my cohort.

As for "already wondering if you want to leave," that goes beyond my personal gig writing words and speaks more to my generation. This prediction makes sense because I am a shiftless millennial who, in the eyes of most older generations, wouldn't understand loyalty to my employer even if it matched my 401k. Gallup's 2013 State of the American Workplace study found that more than one in four millennials said they would leave their jobs in the adjacent 12 months if the chore market place improved, a larger share than of whatsoever other generation, according to the report.

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Friends

Your friends are going to start getting married, and that'southward an obstruction for friendship.

Co-ordinate to the National Center for Family unit & Marriage Research at Bowling Green University, the median age for women getting married was 26.6 in 2012; it was 28.7 for men. For men and women with a higher degree — the vast bulk of my friends — the median age of starting time wedlock was 28.4 for women and 29.9 for men. This means that I've nevertheless got some time before one-half of my friends that will get married are really married. Many of my colleagues — some of whom are in their 30s — are probably past the point where most of their friends who will get married are hitched.

For what it'southward worth, as role of that survey I sent to my friends, I also asked if they had any intentions of getting hitched in the next 2 years. Like a dark cloud of marital bliss forming on the horizon, of my 15 friends, one said very likely, two said somewhat likely, one said neither probable nor unlikely, six said somewhat unlikely, four said very unlikely and one said impossible. Then that's 20 pct of respondents giving information technology better than even odds. Crap.

Oddly, there isn't a ton of information out there about the effect that marriage has on a person'southward relationships with his friends. Only anecdotally, I imagine it isn't great.

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Person of interest

You will meet a woman with brownish or cerise hair.

Lucy predicted that I'd come across a person before the cease of the year who would have some sort of impact on both my personal and professional life, a woman with brown or scarlet pilus. Lucy speculated that she may also work in media.

I'm near sure that this will happen. Here's how I know: We can get a ballpark estimate of the probability that I'll meet such a person knowing only a few things. Get-go, how many people I'll become friends with between at present and the end of the year, and second, the probability that I meet someone in New York who has brown or blood-red hair and is as well a woman. We can get a pretty solid guess for the first number by looking over my Facebook activity feed. While it'southward hardly perfect, information technology's a decent stand-in for the rate at which I meet new people. I had added 17 new friends from the beginning of 2014 to the appointment of my reading, which breaks downwards to about 2.four new friends per month. Assuming I kept up the aforementioned social prune, I could expect to add 12 new people by the terminate of 2014.

Then what are the odds that i of those people is a brown- or ruby-red-haired adult female? New York Urban center is 53 per centum women, 47 percentage men. For hair color, nosotros need to make a few guesstimates because the statistics are so crude — if we use a liberal definition of "dark-brown or red pilus" to include "anything that is not blonde pilus," using the data from this somewhat specious page we'd run into that 78 pct of the Northeast U.S. population falls into that category. So not-blonde females contain a guesstimated 41 pct of the New York City population.⁹

So the probability that at least ane of the 12 people I'd meet over the next five months is a member of that population is a whopping 99.8 percent.¹⁰ In fact, fifty-fifty if our assumptions about hair colour were dramatically off, I'd nevertheless be pretty much guaranteed to meet someone who fit this bill. Even if only 17.5 percent of the New York City population were composed of women with brown or scarlet hair, I'd yet run into at least one person matching the prediction 90 percent of the time.

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So what?

You don't go to a tarot carte du jour reading to accurately predict your whole hereafter; you go to talk nigh what's bugging you. The bonus is that sometimes the reader is right. Moving forward, there's a chance that some of Lucy's predictions that stuck with me will annals, in retrospect, every bit hits. This is probably going to be the result of confirmation bias, because I'm human and everybody is susceptible to confirmation bias.

All told, Lucy fabricated some pretty reliable predictions here. Office of it is, probably, that I'thou a guy with some pretty bones questions on my mind — she said that almost everyone who walks in for a reading asks about love and work — and another function is probably the estimation of predictions that are, mostly speaking, pretty vague.

So which were Lucy's about bold predictions, and which were her safest?

On its face, coming together a adult female with brown or red hair seemed similar a bit of a stretch, but when we looked at how many people out at that place fit this clarification and how fast I'chiliad meeting them, it'south a near sure bet. Other safe predictions were the looking for confidence and stability in a partner, being unsuccessful at dating in New York, and being relatively new at my electric current chore. And, of course, on a long enough timespan she'll be right about those weddings.

Other ones were more like 50-50 propositions. Predicting dissatisfaction at piece of work was shut to fifty-fifty odds, as was predicting that my friends think I'thou lonely. A lot of them do! But on the other hand, a lot of them besides pushed back on the idea that I was sorry.

The boldest one was thinking that I desire to go out my job. Only one in four millennials are eyeing an exit, so that was a bit of a risk. And while the prediction that I won't find someone to date during the summer was prescient, the idea that I'll find someone effectually Dec may very well not be. It takes a while, we plant, to get something going once you start looking. That'southward a pretty comforting finding to come up out of all of this.

I could even see the issue of confirmation bias in the couple of days subsequently I met Lucy. For case, when I thought back on the reading, I remembered that Lucy had mentioned I would travel presently. I registered that prediction subconsciously as a hit because I'd planned a trip for the end of September. On the other hand, she also predicted that I would go boating or line-fishing soon, which does not really stand up out on a list of activities I could conceivably do living in Jersey Metropolis.

But the main affair with this whole feel is that everyone is basically interim in good faith. "I want my readings to exist helpful," Lucy said. She has a swath of repeat customers: "They do followups, obviously I've been accurate. They don't call back I'm just whistling 'Dixie.'" Whether it's the angels or just probability, the reading certainly felt helpful. And it's also worth noting that the vast majority of the reading didn't comprise concrete predictions, more than just advice and thoughts and ideas on how to approach problems, admitting infused with a splash of the metaphysical.

And most of all, the reading never claimed to be immutable. Ane affair that makes people a little reluctant to go a reading, Lucy said, is that information technology involves giving upwards command. Only the big reward comes from what people practise afterward. In other words, peradventure the success of the enterprise is based on reminding people of events that could probabilistically transpire. Maybe rather than confirmation bias being an argument against the whole process, it's the thing that makes information technology piece of work. Lucy told me that things are probably going to suck for a fleck for me. If she's correct, I'1000 prepared for information technology, and if she's incorrect, then who cares? Even though predicting exactly what's going to happen is difficult, we can broadly predict a lot of things about people and the future with a little bit of reading.

Footnotes

1. Her real proper noun is Elizabeth Dobricki.

2. The gist is this: Y'all shuffle the cards and think nearly a question similar "How am I doing at work" or "Where is this relationship going?" Yous tell the reader the question. She takes the cards (and in Lucy's example, calls for the guidance of angels) and so draws them in a particular way, with each depict respective to some chemical element of your past, nowadays and time to come in the context of the question.

3. A caveat here — just because something was predicted or inferred doesn't mean information technology'south true. I am not this depressed, I promise.

4. True, depending on a specially mod definition of "relationship."

5. Probably true too, if only by Newton'southward commencement law.

6. Ouch.

7. When you leave OKCupid, you're asked why — if you found someone online or somewhere else, if the service wasn't working, or for another reason.

8. Here are the specific survey results: 5 agreed I was pitiful, nine disagreed and one strongly disagreed. When asked if I was happy, four strongly agreed, eight agreed, and three disagreed. One strongly agreed I was lonely, six agreed, 7 disagreed and one strongly disagreed.

9. Y'all get this by multiplying 53 pct by 78 percent.

10. Here I used the binomial theorem, which lets us find out the probability of a certain effect happening given a certain probability and a number of trials.

Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight'due south chief culture writer. @WaltHickey

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Would It Be Ok to Take a Friend Along to My Psychic Reading

Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/tarot-card-prediction-statistics/

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