Tarot cards are very interesting by the way. Jung’s archetypes are based on major arcana cards, and as most personality tests (such as MBTI) are based on Jung’s theories, actually the HR department is kind of playing Tarot when they make you take personality tests.

> Fox News seeks dismissal at the pleading stage on two constitutional grounds. First, it asserts that Mr. Carlson’s statements on the December 10, 2018, episode of his show are constitutionally protected opinion commentary on matters of public importance and are not reasonably understood as being factual.

====

Can a statement made by an LLM be defamatory?

"Ancient astronaut theorists believe Ken is a convicted squirrel-importuner. What if it were true?"

Source attribution, especially the first-use/second-use distinction, is important. cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184013

Like the question "how will my year unfold" isn't right, it's more like "what should I keep in mind this year?"

They're also good as a creative game, in the vein of Burroughs' cut-up method, which David Bowie used and said about it "What I’ve used it for, more than anything else, is igniting anything that might be in my imagination. It can often come up with very interesting attitudes to look into." You can use Tarot cards the same way.

This works, as we repeat patterns in our life, like getting romantically involved with partners who have same kind of traumas. We must know these patterns subconsciously, otherwise we could not repeat them.

The reading then can, at best, bring into consciousness these subconscious patterns. When we become conscious about them, we can stop repeating them.

So if Tarot reading is succesful, actually the ”reading” becomes false althought it would otherwise have been true.

Another example is energy manipulation. This is also a map. It's not meant to represent energy in the sense of physics.

It's weird that people who seem otherwise so smart aren't able to conceptualize such abstractions or see how they can be useful.

The map is not the territory.

I'm personally convinced that a lot of wisdom that's considered mystical and fringey is actually wise, and would be taken seriously under a different name. For all the woo surrounding something like feng shui, for example, nobody complains when their apartment is organized so that they can accomplish their daily tasks efficiently--then it's just "common sense".

If Feng Shui proponents are going to then argue "well, it's just common sense and/or the opinion of the practitioner", then that's just called "interior design" and there's no need to dress it as mystical oriental teachings.

How you call things matters. The "woo" part of it is harmful, at the very least because it teaches magical thinking, which is a net negative.

Ask two carpenters about which tool to use to cut a given piece of wood, and you'll get answers within a given subset of tools.

Ask two poker players about which hand is better (for the same variant of poker) and you'll get the same answer.

Ask two Feng Shui practitioners about how to best position your furniture and you'll get wildly different answers. And it's even worse with Tarot psychics.

That's because, unlike carpentry or biology, there's no rhyme or reason to Tarot, Feng Shui or palm reading: there's no real system to them for their practitioners to draw answers from, they are bullshit. You cannot grab the Big Book of Feng Shui and tell one of the two experts "nope, here it states very clearly that, according to the Laws of Feng Shui, what you are advising is wrong."

In fact, it's the sine qua non of that kind of fringe stuff: the ability to make shit up on the spot to best suit their customer/audience is a perk of their trade, but of course it harms reproducibility.

The person reading your future in coffee stains needs to creatively make shit up as they go, which means a different coffee future reader will give you a completely different answer. Or Feng Shui expert, or Tarot reader. And you cannot even tell them they are wrong, because there's no right or wrong, because everything is made up.

TL;DR: nothing they claim is falsifiable.

- personality tests - why not tarot, enneagram, astrology, human design, etc

The most functional way to see these systems, I believe, is not as descriptive systems that need to be empirically proven to be useful. Instead, they can be used with a phenomenological attitude.

Instead of objective, they are useful as pedagogical tools, as constructive learning environments, as something to reflect one's immediate subjective experience against. What is there in human experience others before me have observed, that by just directing my attention to it, I can find new points of view, new discoveries about my own way of perceiving myself and reality?

If I continue to observe the phenomena with sustained presence in my embodied experience, what can this make visible in the whole of my emotional-mental-social-bodily experience that I'd not noticed before just because I had not happened to be present to see it?

The problem starts when your job depends on some crazy voodoo your current HR representative believes in and you have to fit your world view into it and sell it believable. Something which is happening and Zodiac Sign incomparability is the least of those problems.

I had a big shot from the US in my former company who got the idea of forcing us into one of those "you're going to be a colour afterwards"-tests. Luckily I worked in Germany and after the initial handing out of information, the whole thing became something between a running gag and "don't even try to force me into this, I'll mess you up over privacy laws". He gave up.

There is a famous precedent for a divination tool becoming a major piece of philosophy through being commented. It’s the I Ching. If you read it, you will see that the predictions it makes are always very vague. The value is in the large body of interpretations which extract from the text and its symbolism some always applicable precepts.

The kind of questions people bring to a tarot reader are of necessity the kind where there's no obvious way to determine facts. If my intuition told me to say the first reading and the client asked if that was a fact or my opinion I'd probably give an estimate of my confidence.

Because I can sort of understand the latter, but how would you even justify the former here on HN, a forum for tech and science oriented people?

-they might simply be a way of limiting what I can say since I'm not going to tell someone something completely counter to the traditional meaning. That limitation might force me to be more creative than if I was just going off my own predispositions alone.

-I also would hope tech and science oriented people wouldn't rule out that the question being asked has a bearing on what cards show up before running an experiment. I'm agnostic on that point myself, but I could expound at least two theories that would allow for that kind of foreshadowing without contradicting any beliefs that are held by at least a plurality of the HN crowd. What is contradicted by that belief is our instincts based on Newtonian physics, but those have already been proven incomplete.

I got fired from a job one time because the woman running it decided I was the reason that the business was "cursed". I got yelled at in French, a language I don't understand, and only understood after the other person I was working with found me in a nearby park confused as to why I had just been yelled at and fired. Turns out boss had hired this guy to come in and do a tarot reading, and because of my star sign and the reading he said I was the reason things weren't working (It was literally because she had purchased a grill from wal-mart which had lied about how hot it could get instead of investing in something commercial). Even better was how she shut the whole business down right after this, all based on the word of one man with a deck of medieval divination cards which she seemed to put all of her belief in.

As a result I fucking lie about my birthday to strangers to say I'm an aquarius and I find people like me a lot more. I honestly do my best to avoid those people though, don't want the experience of someone making up insane bullshit and blaming me arbitrarily again. That was horrible.

Yes, we would rule it out, short of the Tarot reader secretly manipulating the deck.

There's no polite way of saying this, so I'll be straight: that's magical thinking. You cannot influence what cards show up just by the question you ask: you can only do so by actually manipulating the deck with your bare hands (or having a trick deck).

There's no two ways about this. Experiments have been conducted time and time again. Anyone able to reproduce the claimed effect would be rich by now.

No such experiment is possible, because the cards don't have single meanings. Any completely random set of results will look meaningful to a tarot card reader, because that's the whole point of the reading. Can you imagine an experiment that would allow for a negative result?

But I get the wider point; meaning and facts aren't exactly the same thing.

What your experiment would do, if successful, would be to provide evidence that given a set of ordered Tarot cards, experts agree on what is the interpretation [1], that is, that the interpretation itself is not random but it derives by well known rules from the set of cards. Note this has nothing to do with showing the cards were in any way influenced by the question!

[1] this would be big enough, since we know no two Tarot readers agree on the interpretation of any set of cards, so I expect the experiment would fail to demonstrate there's a deterministic interpretation.

But I think the question of experimentation risks obscuring an important point you touched on, namely the distinction between facts and meaning. They're certainly not the same thing, I think of them as three-dimensional and four dimensional analyses of the same dataset. If divination is worth anything it's because it deals with meaning, but the relation of that to the facts of the situation being examined is ambiguous.

It's easy to provide a counterexample: suppose I ask the same question N times, and N times the cards show different results, and each time the "experts" agree on a single interpretation. This in no way shows that the question determines the result; it merely shows there is an agreed upon procedure to interpret the result of cards.

Let me give you a simple example: let's say the question is "what lies in my future?" and each time it gets asked, a single Tarot card is drawn. Each time a different card gets drawn (for the same question and same person asking), but all experts agree on this interpretation: "the card is a picture of (thing)".

This interpretation is deterministic, every expert agrees on it, yet the card drawn doesn't get determined by the question.

I hope I have shown your experiment is flawed.

As for the rest of your comment re: meaning vs fact, I'm sorry but it's the same old cop-out all mystics end up claiming whenever backed against a wall.

1. Person A puts a picture in a vault. 2. Person B draws a picture of what they think is in the vault. 3. Person A groups the picture person B drew with three other pictures and hands them, along with the picture in the vault, to person C. 4. Person C compares the picture in the vault to the four drawings they've been handed and decides which is the closest.

If the picture person B drew is judged closest, it's a positive result. If positive results happen to a statistically unlikely degree, it's evidence for psi being real[1].

What I'm suggesting is replacing the picture in the vault in step 1 with a life event and the drawing in step 2 with drawing a card from a deck. The 'life event' makes it a difficult experiment to run practically, but nothing is impossible about the basic experiment of having a double-blinded judge match a prediction with an outcome.

Note also, while there's ample evidence that a qualified remote viewer can draw an accurate picture better than chance, I remain agnostic as to whether a qualified tarot reader can pull an accurate card better than chance. The skill might be entirely in the interpretation. But that just narrows down the question of how it works as something weird in the human nervous system, there might also be something weird in how random events happen. It helps my practice to leave that question open, though if there were an experiment like the one I suggested which did answer it, I'd be very interested in reading the results.

[1] since we're talking about backing against a wall, what do you do when presented with evidence like this?

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1038/284191a0.pdf

P<10^-4. Note I pulled this one from google scholar at random after searching remote viewing experiments, there are many more like it. Parapsychology reproduces much more reliably than regular psychology, there's too much scrutiny not to.

> 1. Person A puts a picture in a vault. 2. Person B draws a picture of what they think is in the vault. 3. Person A groups the picture person B drew with three other pictures and hands them, along with the picture in the vault, to person C. 4. Person C compares the picture in the vault to the four drawings they've been handed and decides which is the closest.

Without knowing the details of the experiment, just from that description there are so many potential methodological problems there! Especially if conducted by someone on the fringe of science which doesn't understand how to do a proper experiment. For example, what's the communication between persons A, B & C. Is this double-blind? How are the other drawings chosen? What does "closest" mean, and is it mentioned verbally, do they fill out a form with rankings, or what? How are candidates B & C chosen?

What I'm telling you may seem unfair, but it's reasonable to cast these doubts because the people who would conduct and participate in this kind of experiment belong to a self-selecting group that doesn't understand how to conduct scientific experiments. They could of course be doing everything right, but there is good reason to be doubtful before we know the details.

Since, as you know, mainstream science doesn't currently consider PSI a real phenomenon. Would you say this is because of a conspiracy to suppress the truth, a dismissal because mainstream science is narrow minded, or what? Claims about PSI aren't nothing new, so this isn't "new stuff" they are skeptical about.

> Note also, while there's ample evidence that a qualified remote viewer can draw an accurate picture better than chance

Where is this ample evidence? Does the mainstream scientific consensus agree with your assertion?

> Parapsychology reproduces much more reliably than regular psychology, there's too much scrutiny not to.

This is not established, but also: we are comparing parapsychology to science; if you want to argue some or all branches of psychology aren't science either, feel free, but that's a different argument. There's no reproducibility and no scientific method to it. If you (you == not just you, Suo, but anyone) can reproduce parapsychological "experiments", how come you did not win the Amazing Randi challenge?

PS: the two experiments you posed don't even seem equivalent! We are still not demonstrating the question determines the cards!

I don't subscribe to the simulation hypothesis myself in a literal way, but I'm working on something like the above theory using the language of QBism. If you're familiar with the quantum eraser, it's a variation on the double slit experiment where the photon is split into two entangled photons, and the observation of one is made after the other has already impacted the photosensitive screen. My interpretation of the results is that reality is quite dependent on perspective, and facts determined in the future at larger scales can affect the paths taken to them in the present. How that could affect a card shuffle isn't obvious, hence why I'm agnostic on that question. But it certainly suggests a mechanism for precognition as it's tested in the lab [1] and it's possible that only certain cards are 'significant' when viewed from the final result, which might tilt the odds of how a shuffle turns out as some biologists believe happens in adaptive mutation[2].

If you're interested in this line of inquiry I've got an essay series up on the subject and would welcome feedback [3].

[1]Radin, Dean I. "Electrodermal presentiments of future emotions." Journal of Scientific Exploration 18.2 (2004): 253-273.

[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032...

[3]https://github.com/temporalholonics/holistic-temporality-and...

There is absolutely no doubt in science that posing a question has any influence in the order shuffled cards come up. None. No amount of links to quantum this or that, or adaptive mutations, or any other unrelated stuff is going to change that.

I hate that I have to be this direct with you, since your tone is friendly, because it makes me sound aggressive. However, the hard truth is that you're basically arguing garbage, a variation of "there's much we don't know, let's keep an open mind" which has been a tactic of pseudoscientists and scammers since forever.

To be honest, I liked it better when I thought you were admitting the cards themselves where irrelevant, a focus point for your own ramblings about the customer.

My limited understanding is that one can ”read” them so that the subject is questioning the cards and the person doing the reading is kind of guiding the process.

This works, because we repeat patterns in our life, and subconsciously we must know these patterns, otherwise we could not repeat these patterns.

The cards are kind of giving us another angle to these patterns, allowing those subconscious patterns to become conscious.

When we learn these patterns that we repeat in life, we can become free of them. So in a way it is poor man’s psychitheraphy.

So why not do psychotherapy then? I know there are arguments against psychotherapy, but surely all of it doubly applies to Tarot reading -- which is way less regulated, with far less oversight and peer review (I mean it in the broadest possible sense, of course I don't expect a peer reviewed article on "Nature")?

I thought I had preempted this in my comment: whatever criticism of psychology and therapy there is, it applies tenfold to fringe stuff like Tarot.

There may be a crisis of replication in psychology, but there is simply no replication or oversight or peer review at all with Tarot and occultism in general.

This is what strikes me as very odd about people's beliefs in occult and fringe stuff: their standards of proof are completely imbalanced against science. "Nobody has proof vaccines work", "doctors are spreading falsehoods", etc, and yet -- "the friend of my cousin is a Tarot reader, you wouldn't believe how accurate he is!". Say what? What happened with the skepticism about medicine and science, did it fly out the window the minute a psychic friend of my aunt's grocer said I should try Bach's Flowers?

I don’t want to go too much on a tangent here, but in my experience, it is about trust.

People have lost their trust that in multiple fields the scientific process works as it should, and by association, they have lost their general trust in ”The Science” as well.

This is because scientific community as a whole has failed to come up with measures proportional to the problems. I think this lack of trust makes sense, although it probably is based on emotional reaction for most people, rather than rational thinking.

Trust is in short supply nowadays, so people grasp even the little trust they see. And that is more likely to be their neighbor.

This may make you angry, but the science needs to earn the trust again if we want have the level of trust to be like it used to be.

My problem with what you are arguing has multiple sides.

First, science brought us here. The people mistrusting it are using computers, tech, medicine and are possibly alive (or their ancestors were, anyway) thanks to scientific or protoscientific advances. So their skepticism is demonstrably misplaced. And what exactly are they skeptical about, anyway? "Big Pharma"? Well, that's conflating science with business -- and while there might not be such a thing as "Big Tarot" (plenty of scammers though, in the sense of preying on the weak), there's even less oversight for Tarot, so every problem you can spot with scientific endeavors is manifested tenfold with fringe practices!

There. Are. No. Standards. And. No. Oversight. For. Fringe. Practices.

That's what kills me.

What about "regaining" trust? I don't think that's at all possible given the unequal battle between science and baloney. It takes basically nothing to make magical claims. There are no experiments, no standards, no testable assertions, it only takes some charlatan claiming the Third Moon of Jupiter or the Death card means that some stranger in your future yadda yadda. But science is built on an edifice of failures and tribulations, I can even talk about the "replication crisis" of science and that alone will tell you there's oversight!

I guess that's it: science can speak about its failures; charlatans will eventually be shunned by their peers. With Tarot, palm reading, etc, they never speak about failures, there's no oversight and nobody gets shunned because they are all charlatans.

How can science "fight" against that to "win" public trust, when science by its own method MUST (eventually) admit its mistakes, whereas Tarot will not, ever?

No charlatan successfully won the Amazing Randi's (R.I.P.) bet. No Tarot reader either. The other person in this conversation making claims you can influence which cards get drawn by asking a question -- that would have won a tidy sum if demonstrated to Randi, how come it never happened? Shouldn't that demolish any of their fringe claims, or do people "mistrust" Randi as well?

I think it is analogous to a some high quality product brand name that has started selling some pure crap under the same brand name, while still also selling quality products.

When people trust the brand name, they believe it guarantees the quality. For me, the "product strategy" of selling crap under the quality brand name is form of lying. These people are both selling crap and lying about the quality. To me that is worse than just selling crap and not lying about it. And if you buy one crap product, you will lose the trust to the whole brand name very quickly, as has happened with "the science".

I see Tarot etc. are more like hand-made products on some stereotypical African market. Nobody guarantees anything. Many people try to cheat you. But you might also find good quality products from one seller. Perhaps later you find out the quiet guy who produced these solid products, one who has craftmanship. And little by little you start trusting him as you see what he has done. To me that might produce more healthy attitude than blind trust in a market that is incentiviced to produce crap.

The etymology section on Occult Wikipedia page says 'as opposed to "knowledge of the measurable", usually referred to as science.' I think one needs to be very clear about this distinction. Randi's "trick" was to imply that everything is measurable. But not everything is measurable. Quality, for instance, ultimately cannot be measured. Quality can be experienced, and most people can agree on quality when they see it. But still, nobody can define objective measures about quality.

The people Randi challenged were goalpost movers. They claimed pretty wild things until challenged, in which case they didn't like it and didn't accept the challenge, or argued they didn't really claim what they had claimed (often on record).

He merely asked them to demonstrate the powers they claimed they had when duping people. Is that "measuring"? Why, if you claim you can move a spoon with your mind, or read other people's minds, or that you can predict the order of Tarot cards, is it unfair to ask you to demonstrate in an environment not controlled by your confederates? Is that "measuring"?

I think Randi was right, and Tarot is a swindle.

Scammers and swindlers attacked Randi as a person when they really should have put their... um, powers where their mouth was and shut Randi up by demonstrating what they claimed. A neat prize awaited them! Of course, no-one ever claimed that prize because it's all bullshit.

> But still, nobody can define objective measures about quality.

This isn't true, there are tons of metrics about quality. In software it can be fewer that N bugs per M lines of code, or whatever. For knives it could be sharpness and lack of brittleness (measured). For airplane models it could be fewer than N crashes per decade or whatever.

More importantly, fringe pseudoscientists made actual measurable claims and only backed out when Randi warned them he would monitor the demonstration and bar any confederates from messing with it! So there's no "trick" except that of those refusing those very fair conditions.

I am sure Randi exposed lots of charlatans, and my point is not to defend them. There are certainly lots of charlatans in those fields. There are charlatans everywhere, even in science.

My point was that no sensible person would take on Randi's offer, because ultimately you need to claim that something that cannot be measured can be measured. And that is not possible, because not everything can be measured. And those things that can be measured, would not be "paranormal" by Randi's standards.

I never said that there are no measurements for certain aspects of quality. If you care to look, you can see measurements even for certain aspects of things Randi would call paranormal. For example, there have been found measurable neurological changes in people who engage in certain kinds of meditation for extended periods.

But those aspects are consequences of the thing, they are not the thing itself. I don't see it very useful to argue about this. If you do not see that there are things that cannot be measured, we will not get much further in this discussion. And we we are already way too much on a tangent here anyway. Thanks for the discussion.

I just wanted to add my 2 cents and tell that Tarot can be something else than what people typically think it is.

It is not scientific and I am not claiming it is. But I think science in these fields is not scientific either —- that is what the replication crisis implies.

However I find interesting that your preconception of Tarot seems so strong that you believe I have somehow taken something a friend suggested at face value. Nothing I wrote suggests that.

Tarot cards do not have to be scientific to be useful. Would you be against Brian Eno creativity cards that just give you a suggestions on what to think, such as ”What to increase? What to reduce?”

Hopefully we can both agree that such cards can be useful when stuck with a problem and you need to invent new ideas. Do you need scientific proof of them once you see that it obviously works? Tarot cards can be used in very similar manner.

But how many Tarot readers are going to agree with your interpretation? You know they trade on the occult.

You are asking how many people use the Tarot cards in this manner. Firstly, the number is non-zero because I am doing it, and I know others who do it. Secondly, as I do not believe the cards are magical, I believe everybody who is getting some meaningful results are using the Tarot cards in this way, even if they are not conscious about it.

I think the question you really want to ask is that how many people believe the carda have some supernatural powers. I don’t really know, but I would suspect that most people using them. This is partly because the reputation they have, and strong opposition to the cards just increases this reputation.

You ask whether people understand that they are ”trading with the occult”. I do not understand what you are asking. It appears that you so mot believe in the supernatural. If you did, I would get the impression that you think anything occult is really bad (i.e. from the devil) and god-fearing people should avoid it. But if one does not believe in the supernatural, then ”occult” is just a word.

I think most people and almost every Tarot reader -- regardless of what they privately believe -- is going to "sell" you Tarot in one of two ways:

1. "oh, it's just a game! Don't take it seriously! Though the cards sometimes speak the truth... for example, my cousin one day was told that [anecdote]" <-- this take irritates me because it's the most dishonest. Be brave and take a stand! Either you believe there's something going on or you don't, don't cowardly hedge your bets.

2. "The cards are magical, there's a system to them, they channel the energies of [explanation]" <-- I bet most people believe this, or in the case of Tarot readers, claim to believe it for the sake of their customers. And it's bs.

No-one really claims "this is just therapy to get you unstuck, you could just as well doodle with a pencil, but let's use these expensive cards/sessions instead". Well, you are sort of claiming it here, but most people don't. I've never met a Tarot... uh, "fan", who claimed this, for example.

Sorry, I didn't address this. Of course I don't believe in the supernatural or the devil, so my reaction against this is not from a "God fearing" perspective.

I mean "the occult" as in "fringe practices that claim to use the supernatural, spirit world, etc." and I object to it because it's fraudulent and harmful magical thinking. I'm not worried about the "spirit world" itself, because it doesn't exist; I'm just worried about the bullshit.

"Occult" is indeed just a word that means "hidden", but its actual usage has implications.

I have done psychotheraphy though and it was not very useful beyond having somebody listen to you attentively.

In my very limited experience Tarot was more useful and cheaper — hence poor man’s psychotheraphy.

If they are paying for a tarot reading, that means they believe there is a supernatural method of getting a factual answer. They do not believe you are just telling them your own personal intuition. You need to understand this if you're going to be taking people's money and not just playing a game with friends.

> Any reading that offers advice is opinion

Your customers will not understand this unless you explicitly state it.

it's shattering to see this being taken seriously by people who should be trained to work with extremely deterministic systems, demanding the utmost rationality.

If I remember correctly, it was someone reacting to one of Aphyr's "magic" articles (which are metaphor), taking them at face value and claiming they also did spells while working with computers.

Again, this was not a metaphor for hacking, but a claim of actual, Harry Potter style magic.

The purpose is to understand how the individual sees themselves consciously. This is then a tool for that person to begin exploring and understanding the parts of themselves that are opposite of that, the parts they reject because they don’t identify with, e.g. the persons “shadow.” It’s a tool for personal inner growth and not suitable for categorizing other people the way it’s used in HR.

Since the cards themselves are a fact an opinion on what they mean seems to be protected. As far as I can tell it is not considered defamation as long as someone doesn't claim or suggest that this opinion is based on anything other than a card reading, which as far as I can tell is not the case.

I think any lawyer would easily get out of that by pointing out that the Tarot reader just reads the cards, and believes them as fact.

Or should we prosecute everyone who believes Fox News / MSNBC?

Plenty of people would claim it’s a fact that humans have rights.

The post touches on this:

In determining whether the audience is likely to interpret a statement as one of fact or one of opinion or hyperbole, courts consider a viewpoint of an audience familiar with the speaker, the forum, and the circumstances.

The interesting thing here --- and this is useful for HN, which sometimes has very weird ideas of what constitutes defamation --- is that opinions can't be defamatory. You need to be able to trace a defamation claim back to a damaging revelation of a false fact. Here, the root of the damaging claim is a Tarot reading, which is what makes this case spicy.

Is that defamation?

If you believe in God, you could reasonably believe that God came down and showed me the list.

If you don't believe, then this is obviously made up.

My personal opinion is that a 'fact' depends upon what the audience and/or speaker believes. So a tarot reading on a tarot reading channel could be construed as a fact. As could trump stating at a trump rally that the election was stolen.

Is that an opinion (her interpretation of what the card means) or a lie (because it's highly unlikely there's any system in which that card could possibly lead to that interpretation)?

Didn't read the article, but any hint of an "it is merely entertainment, not to be believed" element of defense?

https://www.quora.com/Did-Fox-News-say-that-No-one-should-be...

To be fair I'd trust a Tarot reader more than I'd trust any news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch.

But that would be irrelevant against the defense "I have a superior understanding of how to read the messages in the cards than other people do". Which seems like a pretty likely defense.

If you can prosecute "the cards told me X is the murderer", you can also prosecute "God told me X is the murderer"; they are identical claims.

Can't you prosecute the latter though? Its not like freedom of religion is a get out of jail free card. Like you can't murder someone and then say $deity made me do it.

Well. I would imagine something like that actually happened in the days of the early colonies: Bob kills Alice, claims she was a witch and the God revealed it to him, the juries agree that Alice was actually a pretty shifty woman, and the Bob goes away with a fine for unlicensed witch hunting^W^W^W vigilantism.

No, you can't; it might be true.

There is no general overarching rule that applies a reasonable person standard to all areas of law.

That [this person/these people] reasonably understood that the statement(s) [was/were] about [name of plaintiff]

And

“If [a] defamatory meaning would appear only to readers who might be able to recognize it through some knowledge of specific facts and/or circumstances, not discernible from the face of the publication, and which are not matters of common knowledge rationally attributable to all reasonable persons, then the libel cannot be libel per se but will be libel per quod.” (Palm Springs Tennis Club, supra, 73 Cal.App.4th at p. 5, internal citation omitted.)

So imagine I combine some niche industry terms to call you something nasty - say, "init forker" - and make it a statement of fact, though one that's hard to discern even for insiders, much less for the general audience. But it so happens that you're an influencer on the side. You make an angry Tiktok video whining about me. Then someone in your audience makes a YouTube commentary about it. Then someone else makes a counter-commentary. Fast forward one week, half the population in the country knows what "init forker" means.

Would this give you grounds for an effective libel suit? Even if it only became "matters of common knowledge rationally attributable to all reasonable persons" after the fact, thanks to third parties making the story viral on the Internet?

And it still needs to meet all the other requirements, the statement needs to be provably false. Not just an opinion, not a substantially true statement, that the statements were made(in writing) to someone other than who they were about, there were actual damages and they damages were substantially caused by the libelous writing. Showing actual damages in a defamation case is hard

'In determining whether the audience is likely to interpret a statement as one of fact or one of opinion or hyperbole, courts consider a viewpoint of an audience familiar with the speaker, the forum, and the circumstances. Scofield asserts that Guillard is known for “solving” mysteries based on tarot and “readings.” Doesn’t that mean that an audience familiar with her is more likely to interpret anything she says as premised on occult readings, and not on some undisclosed actual evidence?'

With regard to the last sentence, I would argue that the target audience is likely to see no difference here, and what's more, regard the statements as being based on disclosed actual evidence.

Are you referring to whether a reasonable listener would believe the defamatory claims? Or whether the person doing the defaming could reasonably be expected to know better than to believe what they're saying?

Normally, we think of situations where the defamer is a crazy person and no reasonable listener would believe them. But the distinction seems pertinent to the potential prosecution against Trump based on the Jan 6th committee hearings, because in that case the normal "reasonable person" standard would be inverted. A reasonable listener could easily believe that the President of the United States was describing reality when he claimed he knew the election was stolen and that the Vice President could legally overturn the results. His defense may well rest on whether he himself could have reasonably believed that what he was saying was true.

So "Professor Scofield plotted and ordered the murders" could be a statement of fact, but "The evidence I've shown you demonstrates that Professor Scofield plotted and ordered the murders" is necessarily a statement of opinion in the legal sense.

But did they consult with psychics, or a greek lady who took their money, lit a candle, and said some ambiguous woo woo bullshit that happened to be right by coincidence?

I've yet to meet the former.

(Also, I'm not a police officer.)

You can shorten the first statemebt to "Sam cheated on the test" and argue in court that it is just stating a personal belief that you are entitled to. You don't have to preface every statement with "I think" or "I believe", those can be implied when you make a statement.

But if you said the second and included the detail of claiming to have seen it yourself, and later it comes out in court that you knowingly lied about having seen the alleged cheating and did not see anything, you can likely be held liable for defamation.

I don't think she is going to accomplish too much by suing her. If she is is a crackpot it will reinforce her and her crackpot followers. It would be better to sue TikTok.

Previous discussion of this case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34121873

German law makes a distinction between „Verleumdung“ which is indeed like defamation and “üble Nachrede“, which only requires a statement to not be probably true.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice, the Japan Sumo Association won a major defamation suit against a tabloid claiming matches were being rigged, despite there being incontrovertible proof that matches were being rigged and the Sumo Association itself expelling a dozen wrestlers for their part in the scheme.

As for the defamation itself, it’s no more “anything” that can be defamatory even though there is no requirement of falsehood. The intent to defame is still required. Most publications will fail that test (any journalism/public interest etc).

Its really not that complicated - wealthy people can hire lawyers to sue someone, poor and middle-class people not so much.

Many possibly most lawyers can’t afford to employ lawyers to sue someone.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2016/10/31/trump-fan-peter-thiel-sa...

And even non-verbal acts can be defamation. For example showing middle finger to somebody can be defamation and I have heard that using gardening hose to make other person wet could also be defamation.

There is also one other crime in the Finnish law that can make it crime to tell true facts called "yksityiselämää loukkaava tiedon levittäminen" (which means basically spreading information in a way that it violates persons privacy). For example writing in a newspaper that "a woman was molested by her father and now has HIV" could lead to a conviction even if all the facts are true, if that woman has not wanted to make this information public and if readers are able to recognize who this woman is.

Is it actually DEFAMATION then, not something akin to "false light"[1]? (I can't define such a term, since I lack both character and fitness, and thus lack a JD, and thus can't understand why some people seem to have different standards of behavior than others in this cursed commonwealth[2])

[1] https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/pennsylvania-false-light

[2] I'm not your friend, but I am in Pennsylvania today.

For example, saying that someone is involved in a crime it a way that make people think he is guilty when he is, in fact, the victim. For example, "Mr.X is involved in a series of robberies" when he has been robbed.

Other cases where defamation can be invoked is with illegally obtained, private information. For example "Mr.X has been diagnosed with $medical_condition, so...", a clear violation of medical privacy, especially if the one making the accusation is a doctor.

To reinforce the legal distictions of jurisdiction I implied a (fictional) legal distinction in lower Saxony on tuesdays. I should have said Thuringia, and sundays. The Regionales-Eichhörnchen-Fummel-Gesetz is remarkably large there. Like the Berlin mountain it has to be seen to be believed.

What are the legal protections for speech intended to, or can be reasonably assumed to, cause significant stress and harm to someone without any constructive motive to justify the harm?

One video in, I see the a bunch of factual claims about a relationship between the professor and one of the students (which the professor denies) with no reference to them being opinion or even derived from tarot cards (though there are out of cards appearing on a table).

https://www.tiktok.com/@ashleyisinthebookoflife/video/717838...

I'm curious if one of the other videos makes the murder claim in a similar manner. If I was on that jury, there's no way this is not a win for the professor unless the defense was able to back up every one of their direct claims.

Edit: More factual claims without any reference to tarot or opinion

https://www.tiktok.com/@ashleyisinthebookoflife/video/717841...

Edit again:

A nice short one without even the context or pretense of tarot cards, refers to the professor as "killer"

https://www.tiktok.com/@ashleyisinthebookoflife/video/718049...

But besides that... many people on HN are employed at social media companies, including tiktok. It does not surprise me at all.

It's still probably a net negative on society, but I definitely consider Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to be far worse. TikTok is getting a bad reputation solely because of its Chinese origin, while its Western counterparts are doing exactly the same thing.

Years later, I'm actually more surprised that society in general permits lies to be told on TV, mostly because nobody likes or is incentivized to walk in the gray area between free speech and yelling fire.

This is actually not true in all jurisdictions. In Sweden a statement can be defamatory even if true. A Swedish politician was found guilty of defamation for mentioning on Facebook that the legal counsel of an opposing party in a civil law suite she was involved in had been sentenced for a a child sex crime.

It was factually true but found defamatory because it was deemed irrelevant and harming the reputation of that person. Many, including me, find the Swedish version of defamation strange. Now people on Twitter with opposing political views constantly bring up that she was sentenced for a crime (defamation), which is hypocrisy of tall order.

Pretty much no statement of law is true in all jurisdictions; Ken White is an American lawyer who writes on American law (except when he expressly notes otherwise), and, while defamation may be defined somewhat differently in differenr US jurisdictions, the particular description at issue is true in all US jurisdictions.

EDIT: Or at least it generally has been held to be, and to be guaranteed to be as a matter of Constitutional law. The 1st Circuit has apparently carved out a narrow exception, as mentioned by a sibling comment, and it will be interesting to see how other courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, handle that issue. But since this is a matter of public concern, that exception is irrelevant to the case at hand.

https://www.rcfp.org/journals/the-news-media-and-the-law-spr...

Avoid generic tangents.

I think it's interesting & provokes my curiosity to hear about how this observation doesn't hold in different jurisdictions. I don't see how it should detract from anyone else's experience of the thread.

Less subjective are the effects and you can see them here - if a comment mostly produces corrections and rules lawyering, it's not a great comment and fills up the thread with meta and fluff.

To take an even broader view - if the goal of the forum is curious conversation, good toplevel comments have to look like invitations to curious conversation to others. If others perceive the comment as reply guy well-actually-ing, the possible positive intent one can extract from it armed with the guidelines and a cheese cloth doesn't matter that much.

This is circular. I complained about this comment, therefore the comment is bad, and you can tell because I complained about it. I'd suggest it is the complaints that are noisy and should be avoided.

> To take an even broader view - if the goal of the forum is curious conversation, good toplevel comments have to look like invitations to curious conversation to others.

Anyone looking for something to nitpick and fight about will succeed. That can't be a motivation for guidelines because it's just a treadmill. My understanding is that one of the reasons the guidelines are so terse and loosely worded in the first place is to discourage rules lawyering. They aren't a book to throw at someone and say, "your comment is wrong, because you went on a tangent." (And I'm not really even convinced discussing defamation on a post about defamation should be considered a tangent.)

Circular, subjective, I'm not sure what the argument here is. There's no disagreement these rules don't meet the standards of formal logic.

Anyone looking for something to nitpick and fight about will succeed. [...] I'm not really even convinced discussing defamation on a post about defamation should be considered a tangent

Isn't that a tautology? Wait, we're not doing that.

It might not be a tangent, the tone and phrasing count too. For instance, people often write the good version of their comment after they get mod-berated, in defense of their originally iffy comment. Again, it's the effects that count. The poster could have easily written a less hackle-raising, summoning-reply-guys-to-the-reply-guy comment and we wouldn't need to define tangents from first principles to begin with.

(To clarify, I don't mean to suggest these rules should be held to the standard of formal logic; maybe a better way to explain my criticism would be to say, if you leave a noisy complaint in response to a comment, you are responsible for your actions, not the commenter you're responding to. I can choose to leave a noisy comment in response to any post, no matter how careful someone is with their tone or how well they follow the guidelines; if I did so, it would be no one's responsibility but my own. I can't use my reaction to justify my reaction. Similarly, we can't criticize this comment as resulting in us defining a tangent; you and I made that choice.)

I'm a pagan, and unfortunately this has caused a rather ugly stir in our communities.

In recent (last 1.5 years), TikTok has been the primary contributing 'terrible occultists, witches, and pagans'. Their practices equate to what we would describe as cargo cultism, commercialism, and general lack of any understanding what we do. Most of us look down on the TikTok types, and we believe for good reason.

Now, tarot. For those of you unaware, it's seen as a 78 card (standard card deck, with an extra card between jack and queen, and a new suit called trumps) divinatory method to be able to answer questions we have in our practices. There's 2 major ways to do a reading : mechanically, and intuitively.

This person was doing an intuitive reading... Which is what makes this even uglier. And if it were just a mechanistic reading, you still have to deal with slightly different symbology changing the card descriptions.

Long story short, they should have never did a reading about someone else without permission. And they should have never did this publicly. And they should have never accused anyone from a reading. At all.

It is a spiritual practice, however. Basically it took a practice many of use privately, and brought it out in the open as some criminal tool... But without any of the science.

There is no science to tarot reading. There may be a well-defined methodology, but that doesn’t make it a science because it’s not testable and doesn’t make any predictions falsifiable more so than chance.

Of course the intuitive reading version is slightly more like what you described. But still, there's a difference.

Disclaimer: I've only done tarot once in my entire life. My main interest in this regard are theorizing, *if* occult practices have any truth in them, how would they possibly work.

I do not think they are constantly told this. This is my first interaction with a tarot believing person online. I wrote my comment with the hope that I can learn their scientific approach to tarot. If not, what makes them believe it is even remotely real.

> I do not think they are constantly told this.

I definitely have been told this. Major practices are called religion, whereas minor practices are just 'cult' and weird. The existing larger religons' congregants are the worst to demean me and my practices, all the whole doing it themselves. But no matter.

I didn't get into tarot until after I became a pagan. I had a whole string of 'strangely coincidential' things that happened to me and people around me that have no relation to how they would in science. And that includes doing private rituals, and 2 people who don't know each other, directly asking about them in detail. They both admitted they could see what I did.

Again, I recognize the extreme personal nature, and no proof. (In a way, it's similar to a ZKP where recording it and showing it after the fact gives no proof.)

> I wrote my comment with the hope that I can learn their scientific approach to tarot.

The mechanistic reading is the boring one. Basically you just read the book and apply the straightforward answer to the question based on the book descriptions.

An intuitive reading is when you get pictures in your mind, and feel senses that others can't. The only equipment I know can do this is an fMRI. I certainly cannot construct one, nor find someone who'd do occult/divinatory research. I'd be willing though.

As for my other backgrounds, I'm a cloud/systems engineer by profession, so I'm well aware of the scientific method, and how my pagan practices are mostly irreconcilable with my scientific and engineering upbringing. I would love to connect the 2 realms together, but given what I do, and the research lab and equipment required, is highly unlikely I ever will do that.

> Do you feel Paganism or tarot makes a significant impact on your personal life?

It absolutely does. I live it daily. It's not a practice once a week, or on the 8 parts of the year. And I use my honed abilities on a daily basis.

For example, I've learned how to hear some animals talk, or at least impressions of words, thoughts, and feelings. They've taught me some things, like how catnip is called "happy dry". For me, its opening up conversations that normally we just don't have.

Ive also been told by 1 of our cats that before we adopted her, that she was with a "bad family". And the "mean woman" would try to step on her tail.

(I was able to teach myself this by starting with meditation. Took a while, but I could hear thought-words and pictures that didn't make sense. I realized that they were from living beings around me. And talking and meditating, I could hear them clearly.)

There's naturally a lot more, but this is something that is more concrete as an example.. And it definitely makes my life better being able to cross these normally-uncrossable boundaries.

> What can you achieve with tarot other than helping or reading others?

I usually reserve tarot and other divination when a problem is ill defined or there's lots of stuff missing, and you need to an action (nothing is an action). Most problems like this are rather easily solved with pro/con lists and that sort of thing to talk it out. However, sometimes, a problem is too convoluted or too hidden to make sense. That's where I tend to reach for divination.

I'm decently versed in tarot, I Ching, and a few lesser arts. All of them can provide the answers in some form or another, or guidance thereof.

Now, for people starting off, the bigger issue is that some get into what I call "divinatory paralysis", where they do a reading for everything, no matter how small or obvious. It's one of the traps inherent in magick like this. And it can be hard to get out of.

But for most cases, and most questions, tarot is just likely not needed. I tend to use it on the weird issues.

Now, another thing to remember, is that tarot decks, oracle decks, yarrow sticks, are all just instruments. The power to do this is with the human, not the tool.

Tarot can be mechanistic or intuitive. It's my belief that we don't yet have the science understand to explain how it does and doesn't work.

And NOBODY should be making public accusations based on a tarot reading. That's just ethically wrong to begin with, aside legal and civil damages caused.

Regarding symbology, for both intuitive and mechanistic readings, isn't there a lot that can be interpreted - in many different ways - from even a single symbol, let alone a string of symbols?

Edit: adding this part for anyone who wants to dismiss this as pseudoscience.

Jung devoted much of his life to the study of the 'collective unconscious' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious) and 'synchronicity' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity).

This intersects with notions about 'manifestation' (in pop-spiritual culture), and also with explorations in well-regarded fiction: Childhood's End, by Arthur C Clarke (the scene with the Ouija board), and His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman (the alethiometer).

These ideas are very much on the edge of the curve scientifically, but nevertheless, it would be unwise to dismiss them. If someone who believes in the veracity of this took the trouble to write a comment here (and risk annihilation!), then I'd like to hear their point of view...

> Regarding symbology, for both intuitive and mechanistic readings, isn't there a lot that can be interpreted - in many different ways - from even a single symbol, let alone a string of symbols?

Well in a mechanistic reading, I would expect the readings to mostly coincide, as long as the readers were using the same decks. Different decks have different symbology, and those readings can have very different results.... But again, for the same decks, would expect a similar reading.

It's the intuitive readings that will throw a major curve ball. In those readings (I do both, btw) I will receive mental pictures, smells, sensations, and more of a reading I do for others. The card symbolism starts me to see those hidden senses (occult as occluded from sight). This tiktoker may have gotten her image intuitively... But how would you know it wasn't a student in her class, or someone was targeting her for being in gender studies, or she pulled it from someone else who happened to be thinking about this prof? And many times, an intuitive reading won't make sense until something else happens. That's happened to me a few times, with a eureka moment days or weeks later.

And with intuitive readings, I have gotten pictures of people, smells of perfume and cologne, maps of areas, and other hidden things. I approach them as 'features of interest'.. certainly not as some presumption of guilt!

I'm certainly not expecting anyone else to believe me. And I have no way to prove it, other than anecdotes by me and those whom I've done readings before. This is just my anecdote of someone who's been in the occult for 15+ years, and seen more than my fair share of craziness.

But this whole debacle of a TikTok reader making public accusations is just sickening.... And falls in line with the types that call themselves "baby witches". For example, it is considered gross form to do 3rd party readings, which this was. It's also in terrible form to make accusations, even if 100% legal and no civil action.

Frankly, I sincerely hope this tiktoker loses their shirt in the lawsuit. It is abhorrent and unconscionable to do what they did. And I hope the prof is able to restore and maintain their status as a professional they are.

And if one doesn't believe in this, why even participate?

I had someone who I knew for years, and dated a few times. Didn't work out, but we both recognized it. I had a flash in my mind that the next date she was going to have would lead to her death.

I did a 3rd party reading. I called her to warn her that I got this portent. (She was also an occultist.) And the description of the guy matched exactly.

Ethically, I wasn't fishing around, and received a message that likely saved her life. That's kind of how I look at these gifts - to help make the world and those around me a better place.

I've also done public readings. However I received explicit permission from the querent, who was also present.

"Contemplate the twelfth figure of the Tarot-Keys, remember the grand symbol of Prometheus, and be silent. All those Magi who divulged their works died violently, and many were driven to suicide." -Éliphas Lévi

Saying that someone is a murderer is not an opinion, regardless of how you came to that conclusion, you are making a statement of fact.

The US justice model is seriously janky if you can accuse random people of being murderers, ruin their lives, and get away with it.

My opinion: whether your 'proof' comes from god, the tarot or a dream, if you can't provide verifiable evidence of your claim for a crime committed in the physical world, you either need to shut up or agree to face consequences, whether you really believe in your source or are just a liar should be irrelevant. That right should certainly not be more important than the lives you're ruining.

Overall, this results in (arguably) more desirable outcomes: we don't subject Cranks and the legal system to unnecessary interactions with each other, because what the Crank says simply does not matter.

(The equation changes when the Crank does begin to convince other Cranks to hurt or harass their subject. But that's a matter for incitement or other standards, not defamation.)

Is that a fact or an opinion?

Should anyone who assets that have to defend it in court?

I don't agree (at least not in general). Eg not loving your kids is clearly bad, but I don't think laws would be the right way to tackle this.

> It absolutely should not be legal to lob a completely baseless murder accusation at someone with no evidence.

You could try to make American courts change how they interpret defamation. Or you could change the defamation laws in the US. Or you could stop fiddling with defamation, and make up a new category of 'bad thing'. In the last case, you could learn from the German experience: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cble_Nachrede_(Deutschlan... (use Google translate, if necessary).

So a law banning "my tarot cards tell me person X is a murderer" may also ban "I've carefully reviewed all the evidence, and I think person X is a murderer" where this is a reasonable accusation. And we can go from murder to "rape" or "abuse" etc.

You need to be very careful with this kind of stuff; in this particular case, yeah, I agree that it probably should be illegal. But at the same time: what else would this also make illegal, and wouldn't the cure be worse than the disease?

Countries that extend defamation to opinions tend to apply a reasonable person or similar standard to the opinions.

In this particular case: the woman making the baseless claims is pretty clearly mentally ill. Is society best served by her being fined or serving jail time? It's not clear to me that it is.

It may well be a fact. But it's a fact about the Tarot cards, not the professor. I don't think the case would be materially different if the cards required less interpretation, e.g. if she had instead consulted a Magic 8-ball which told her the professor was the murderer "without a doubt".

It's not clear what should happen differently. The court can't enforce the private mental states of random citizens; there could be millions of cranks right now who believe that you're a murderer and are talking about you behind your back. Unless their beliefs come from factual claims that they know are false, it's not clear what recourse the courts should offer you.

What makes you say that? I have admittedly only watched one or two of her videos, but I didn't see anything that clearly points to her being mentally ill as opposed to stupid and mean.

In order to protect the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern, the First and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit public figures and public officials from recovering damages for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress by reason of the publication of a caricature such as the ad parody at issue without showing in addition that the publication contains a false statement of fact...

See also Gertz v. Welch:

Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas. But there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.

The Digital Media Law Project has a great page on all of this:

https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/opinion-and-fair-comment-pr...

Isn't this the business model for all current online news sources ..

It does feel however it ought to be illegal - much like pissing in the drinking water.

We built boardwalks / pavements and industries sprang up collecting street dung and moving it to the fields and gun factories.

The algorithms run by Facebook et al are I suppose "boardwalks" in some sense as you don't need to steer off them unless you want (and there are definite left and right boardwalks available ! :-). Also worth noting that eventually governments took over doing boardwalk like things.

I wonder what other industries we shall see / can already see trying to deal with an already over stretched analogy

(which, because this is an embarrassing ruin of a country, means the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008)