How to Spot an Impostor or a Charlatan?

          In 1948 the psychologist Bertram Forer made an unusual and surprising experiment. First and foremost, he used astrology columns from a wide range of magazines. He then gave his pupils meaning his students to read and rate themselves after their own assessment. 

   Well here is the experiment. It may surprise you .Dear listener or watcher .I know you personally and here is the way I would characterise you. You greatly like to be appreciated and like by people. You have a propensity to self-critical with yourself. You have an enormous reservoir of unused capacity- which you have not mine yet to your advantage. You have some personality weaknesses, which you can generally overcompensate for them. From outside, you are self-controlled and self-disciplined. From the inside you are tend to worry and feel insecure. Sometimes you doubt whether you made the right the decision. You like change and become unsatisfied when hinder by obstacles. You like the fact that, you are an independent thinker and do not swallow whatever is purported to you without evidence.

           You find unwise to reveal yourself to completely expose yourself to people. There are moments where you are sociable meaning extroverted and moment where you are introvert. Your thoughts are always about, the hope of a better life- the future glory of your name or the fly of the illness of life. Some of your aspirations are sometimes unrealistic.

   Key question: Do you recognise yourself within these lines. In the scale of 1 to 10, how would rate yourself? (Here 1 you score poorly and 10; you score perfection.

   When the students rated themselves by 9.3 of 10.So the total accuracy was 86%.The experiment was repeated over decades and decades and the results turnout to be closely the same.

   I bet you rated yourself by 9 or 10 to. Most people tend to identify themselves in such universal descriptions. Science calls this the Forer effects .By the way the Forer explain why pseudo-science such as astrology, astrotherapy, handwriting, analysis, tarot card.

     What is really behind the Forer effect is that, the majority of the statements are too general and therefore apply to anyone of us. “Anyone of us is proud for being independent thinker “Who isn’t? Who likes to see him or herself as a dunce follower?

 The second thing in the Forer effect is the feature positive effect plays a large rule: Yes- indeed reread or relisten and you will spot that- the text contains no negative statement. It stated only what we are and did not include – what we are not. Just as reading a heathy recipe of salad which omits to include the rate of cholesterol in the oil dressing right.

Third the king of all errors- which is the confirmation bias- meaning taking seriously who we are (correspond to our self-image) and unconsciously filter out who we are not.

      By the way this is what is used by most consultants, experts, decision makers across board in different industry. Yes we have the strong tendency to retain elements that seem to confirm our thesis and we forget what I call silent evidence.EG; Multimillionaire.

Second example:A look at the profit and lost clearly shows that savings can be made.We advice company to focus on emerging economies to secure future market share.Sound about right No?

  How would you rate the prowess of such a guru?   

The kernel point of my thoughts and big take away  are the following two big ideas

1-An impostor or a charlatan Conflates or mistake benefit for absence of risk just as discussing growth without concern for fragility: like studying construction without thinking of collapses. Think like engineer not economist Buffett” “In order to succeed, you must first survive.”

2- an impostor is always giving recipe for what to do and never what not to do or avoid. Forgetting that we live long by not dying.

3- The tragedy of our time is the monoculture of ideas: all people are forced to believe the *same* errors. By the way it take a lot of self-confidence and intellect to recognise-that what make sense; really doesn’t make sense.eg Most books about how to and scientific which become bestsellers aren’t due to their validity or relevancy but to social contagion via marketing and sensationalisation.

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