I thought fortune-telling was interesting after my Fortune-telling Experience 20230809.

  • I’ll write down my thoughts.

  • I noticed that fortune-telling combines factual statements about what will happen and advice on what you should do.

    • It’s like using circular reasoning, saying that you are destined to become XX, so you should become XX.
  • It’s simple, but it cleverly exploits the tendency of people to believe when something is asserted.

  • My prediction of how fortune-tellers work:

    • 1: They start by making educated guesses based on patterns in appearance and speech.
      • “This person doesn’t seem to have a girlfriend.”
    • 2: They construct a consistent story while fine-tuning their accuracy based on the feedback they receive.
      • So, I tried to be a good customer by actively giving feedback like “That’s right!” or “Hmm…?”
      • This is similar to using ChatGPT effectively.
        • Provide background information or topics you want to talk about at the beginning and give feedback on the presented “fortune-telling results.”
      • They expand on things that seem accurate and quickly stop talking about things that receive a negative reaction, so most of the conversation time is spent on “accurate things.”
        • The memorable moments are also the ones that turned out to be accurate.
  • It was a good opportunity to hear a consistent future story that could possibly happen and think about it.

    • This seems similar to SF prototyping or omoikane.

The premise/prompt/setting of “this is fortune-telling” seems to work very well.

  • Normally, you wouldn’t talk about your career or relationship anxieties to someone you just met.
    • But there is a need for such conversations.
    • Thanks to the mysterious premise that fortune-telling can understand without you saying anything, the other person initiates the conversation.

In the end, I realized that it depends on the personality and conversational skills of the fortune-teller.

  • The other day, I had a fun conversation and consulted with an interesting older lady, so it was enjoyable.
  • But I think it would be boring if the person was difficult to talk to.