So, as could be predicted, I heard yet another psychic and his usually barely questioning, if at all, interviewer/host (more often the latter, in a rather friendly sense of the word) give a disclaimer, for the potential that the psychic's reading could be wrong (Gasp! I know, right?). I don't know how new this excuse is, I suppose it's not (I wouldn't know, Methuselah.), but the way it's presented brings up a curious issue of probabilities.
The future, the disclaimer tells us, is not "set in stone, it's changeable, determined by you!" Psychics refer to this as your "probable future". Of course, this also means that if it's a bad future, you, as the recipient of the ominous reading, are more likely to act to attempt to change it. But that warning given to you, being near simultaneous to the asserted probability it's claimed to have, must almost assuredly make an alternative future more probable, lest that knowledge be meaningless to know, and if it is, that makes the future certain, does it not? So why refer to the original future as the most probable? Does the psychic doubt his own influence? That's not reassuring. If anything, a psychic should have great self-confidence.
Also, what exactly qualifies a future as being the "most" probable?
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