Ouja Boards ?

[Jonluw]

The people who are like `OMG ITS DANGEROUS` make me laugh. I once got told off by my friend for touching her mum's tarot cards (`Because it's dangerous to touch ones that don't belong to you!`).

Damn, I would've been so tempted to just spread the cards out over my chest and rub them around while making 'mmmm' noises.

I do have a friend who believes in that kind of stuff, and I am civil around him and all, but it's fucking frustrating to listen to.

I did touch all of them while she was in the other room. Just because.

Did you died?
*gasp*

Maybe you're a ghost and I'm talking to you now because the escapist is a tool for contacting the afterlife!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
YOU'RE ALL GHOSTS!!!!!!!!

They put me in mind of the Mythbusters. Not neccesarily using scientific rigour to prove a point but making an amusing show which proves the point anyway. And, like Mythbusters, when you are trying to disprove ass-backwards logic, sometimes scientific rigour is not neccesary.

It's not that they aren't rigorous. The nature of the show doesn't need them to be.
It's just that they occasionally use dubious sources and don't care to fact check, which results in arguments which are just plain wrong.
i.e. When they aren't discrediting some utter wacko that you don't even need evidence to disprove, take their claims with a pinch of salt.

 

[Woodsey]

It's a toy popularised by Hasbro in the 19th Century.

Concern yourself with something else; the burden of proof for superstitious nonsense lies with the people advocating it, from Ouija boards to religion.

 

[Anti Nudist Cupcake]

The letters aren't picked at random.
The participants sub-consciously move the glass or other marker to spell out the right answer.
It works on the ideomotor effect. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_effect]

If you make the participants wear a blindfold and turn the board around without their knowing, they will still move the marker to the places where they think the letters that make out the correct answer lie. Instead of spelling out anything useful they'll just spell out nonsense.

Oujia boards are fairly well understood as a phenomenon. In fact, they weren't even viewed as anything spiritual when they first where invented as a product.
They were viewed as a parlor trick. Only in recent years have people started attributing the movement of the marker to ghosts. Hasbro inc. currently owns the license to ouija boards. They recently tried to publish a pink ouija board aimed at little girls. This caused some uproar in the American fundamental christian community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija

If you want a more extensive explanation of why oujia boards are bullshit, here is an episode of Penn & Teller's bullshit where they both explain why it's bullshit and perform experiments to prove it:

Spoiler

For some extra fun: Find someone with a ouija board and ask them to uncover some information about the spirit that the person operating the board has no way of already knowing.
The ouija board only answers questions the users know the answer to, so it's pretty useless.

As someone else has said, this pretty much wraps up the thread.
Thank you all for the replies anyway, read all of them but I think it would be pretty weird to reply to each, not that I am expected to do so.

 

[Gardenia]

The letters aren't picked at random.
The participants sub-consciously move the glass or other marker to spell out the right answer.
It works on the ideomotor effect. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_effect]

If you make the participants wear a blindfold and turn the board around without their knowing, they will still move the marker to the places where they think the letters that make out the correct answer lie. Instead of spelling out anything useful they'll just spell out nonsense.

Oujia boards are fairly well understood as a phenomenon. In fact, they weren't even viewed as anything spiritual when they first where invented as a product.
They were viewed as a parlor trick. Only in recent years have people started attributing the movement of the marker to ghosts. Hasbro inc. currently owns the license to ouija boards. They recently tried to publish a pink ouija board aimed at little girls. This caused some uproar in the American fundamental christian community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija

If you want a more extensive explanation of why oujia boards are bullshit, here is an episode of Penn & Teller's bullshit where they both explain why it's bullshit and perform experiments to prove it:

Spoiler

For some extra fun: Find someone with a ouija board and ask them to uncover some information about the spirit that the person operating the board has no way of already knowing.
The ouija board only answers questions the users know the answer to, so it's pretty useless.

What this guy said. There is no Santa Claus either. No Boogeyman, Thor or Vishnu. Water has no memory, vaccines do not cause autism. You cannot heal serious conditions by touch alone. You cannot "see" into the future or talk with the dead. The world is not coming to an end. Accupuncture is equally effective when randomly placing needles. Have a good day.

 

[Major_Tom]

This is the same as asking whether you can buy real stuff with Monopoly money.

 

[Anti Nudist Cupcake]

Have you ever used/seen someone use one of these boards? And please give proper reasons for your interpretation of these boards that explain why you are certain that they are or are not real.

Yeah. Together with a few accomplices I did with a very very Christian girl who thought spirits existed, but they weren't allowed by the church so they didn't.

Don't ask me what sense that idea makes. The reason it didn't was that we decided on it in the first place.

Some fake acting later I'd hooked up with a bunch of ghosts of travellers supposedly killed in a robbery nearby in medieval times and I acted they turned angry during communication with them, ending by pleading them to go bother me instead of the others.

Everybody had a big laugh, except the girl later began seeing those ghosts that I made up myself, according to what she told me a few weeks later. When I told her I had fooled her, and it was all acting, she even got mad at me because she saw it herself.

So yeah, they're fake obviously, but people will believe what they want to believe. You can easily make a gullible person think they're seeing or hearing spirits.

What surprises me is the amount of gullible people out there and the extent of what they are willing to believe.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

People believe what they want to believe and, as long as they keep their superstitious bullshit as far away from me as possible, then I?m good.

 

[BrassButtons]

I know someone who is into them too, but we dont talk about it because our conversations mainly go:

Him: `Want to know how it works?`
Me: `It doesn't`.

Tarot card work perfectly well...for the card games they were designed for. You should learn the rules to one variation, and then next time you can be like 'oh, yeah, I know how they work! OK, I'll be dealer..."