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Underground > Temple >

Giving away your power

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00:21 / 10.06.07

'Gullibility is the Answer' as a tenet

Not as a tenet, I was talking about mako's trick on the sleight of hand dude. I meant the guy was easily flim-flammed, by mako's presentation.
If you wrote HEADS on a piece of paper and said it would predict the coin toss but only 50% of the time and you weren't sure if the paper was what influenced the coins resting state, or if the coins resting state was what influenced the word HEADS on the paper, nobody would be impressed. But it's exactly the same.
As mako said, clever people can be surprisingly slow.

06:52 / 10.06.07

Not as a tenet, I was talking about mako's trick on the sleight of hand dude.

No, I got you. Just saying, is all. Seemed the thread to say/type it in. And it's a good trick, too. Actually, both Mako's and the promotion of that tenet, actually, are pretty good tricks.

11:57 / 10.06.07

(I wrote this last night and then forgot to hit 'post'... silly me!)

Haloquin, I'd think you'd be giving up 'responsibility' in the pizza/Chinese example, but not really power. You're deliberately doing something with your power, you're choosing to not utilize it so you can feel weak(er) or put on, but not using something is not the same as giving it away. Is it? I mean, is it for any of you?

I don't think its the same thing, but it has a similar outcome. And the more I look at it the less difference I see ultimately. I'd use the term 'giving away power' as a synonym for 'giving away responsibility' because when you give away responsibility you are relinquishing power in the situation. In my mind I guess power isn't something you can literally give away, which is what I assume you're getting at? But it is still functionally the same action. In the moments you stop exersizing responsibility you cease to exersize your power, when you not only relinquish responsibility but take on the mindset that you couldn't have responsibility in that moment, you stop using power... and Power isn't something you hold, its more something that you do if that makes sense?

Mako is a hungry fish

14:26 / 10.06.07

Gullibility is the answer.

Is that gullibility in thinking that the person making the call may have an affect on the outcome, or gullibility in thinking that the person making the call may not have an affect on the outcome?

14:42 / 10.06.07

It's gullibility, the trait of being easily fooled, if the dude had stopped to think about it he would have spotted the fallacy in what you said (I think, I don't know the guy obvs.). Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you said doesn't imply any effect at all, either of you on the coin or vice versa.
It doesn't matter whether or not you can affect the flip of a coin with your powers, the example you gave was of gulling a mark. A bit like Penn & Teller in their 'Bullshit' series going around getting people to sign a petition against Dihydrogen monoxide.

Mako is a hungry fish

14:56 / 10.06.07

Yes, it was gulling a mark (I like the term) with statistics being the answer to how he was confused, however statistics doesn't really explain why the coin lands on heads or tails; maybe when I call the result it has an affect on the result (i.e perhaps the circumstances in that momment are right for me to effect it) however I doubt this, though unfortunately I can't completely rule it out.

It's not something that disturbs my sleep, however it is something worth considering every now and then, especially as it relates to magic.

17:44 / 10.06.07

statistics doesn't really explain why the coin lands on heads or tails

No, but physics does. Statistics explains how likely each result was.

Mako is a hungry fish

18:14 / 10.06.07

So does that extend to tossing coins for the I Ching and their relationship to the Trigrams? I think it does, however the coin toss is considered natural and the divination is consider supernatural (in the limited dictionary definition of magic), though the supernatural in this case is an expansion on the simple physics of tossing a coin - putting it in reverse, is the divination then able to predict a coin toss?

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