Magicians less prone to mental disorders than other artists, finds research | Hacker News Reader

Magicians less prone to mental disorders than other artists, finds research

theguardian.com

129 pointsc420112 comments

Another dubious study but something rings like common sense to me. Mentally struggling artists can go on at their craft alone and in isolation. Magicians need to be showpeople in addition to training a lot so any mental health problems would derail their careers. It’s also self selection at play as magicians need different skills than other creatives. Those skills such as being sharp, having laser focus, able at reading the audience don’t gell well with people who are struggling mentally. But I wouldn’t bet there are no magicians with mental health issues either…

I guess it would be interesting to compare them to actors

Or comedians..

Recently discussed here, under "Sad clown paradox": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38198417

Note that the vast majority of magicians are to magic what cover bands are to music. Only artists in that they are performing in front of an audience, not creators in any meaningful way. (Source: I am a consulting mentalist, I am the kind of people mentalists, a very similar profession, offsource the creation to...)

Fascinating. I wasn't aware they outsourced it. I always assumed they came up with their tricks through trial and error.

To paraphrase Norm MacDonald: how do you come up with your material?

The vast majority of them do tricks designed by other people (passed down from a mentor if you come from a living line of performers, out of books/video that genuinely innovative magicians share with the community, or custom made for a particular performer, that's where I come in).

My approach to creativity is to try and know all existing solutions to a problem (which can be tricky in a field that values secrecy but, as you develop original material and knowledge, you get noticed and start building a network of people with access to secret knowledge) then my brain tends to naturally pattern match and come up with new combinations of ideas. But it depends on the project, some things stem from the desired end result: an esthetic, an idea you want to have coming across, or a feeling you want to evoque.

Amateur magician here. I think you're being a little bit unfair. An actor doesn't write the lines they speak. That doesn't make what they do non-creative. One of the things I learned the hard way coming up in magic is that the mechanics of the trick are a relatively small component of the overall performance. Being entertaining as a magician has a lot more to do with very subtle psychology than it does with gaffes and sleights. Inventing new tricks is more akin to engineering than it is to performing.

Everyone benefits knowing a bit about the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff in any job where Creativity/Learning is a requirement.

There is no right and wrong cause everyone hits the tradeoff point sooner or later. And when it happens context switches from Explore to Exploit or vice versa are the way to go.

Some people find it hard to switch up after the point is passed and that's what effects mental health when it's a single person act. With group acts, different dynamic apply cause people see each other blind spots and can compensate.

The tradeoff is effected by lot of different constraints - time, resources, knowledge, access to knowledge etc. Over time People develop awareness of which one has the most influence on hitting the trade off point.

I find the cover band metaphor to be the best description of what most magicians do. It is absolutely a performance, and the experience cannot be boiled down to the list of notes, but is it art? My take is that it becomes art when the performer introduces genuine personality, something uniquely their, to the performance. Which I found to be very uncommon in magic (to my sadness, there exist fantastic magicians who express themselves through the medium in ways that are unique and worth experiencing in person, I would love to see more of that).

I think magic certainly can be art, though I agree with you that it often isn't. Really good magicians are uncommon. But I think the same could be said about actors in general. A magician is an actor playing the part of a conjuror, and most actors in general are just not very good. Acting is hard. It's not, Gene Cousineau notwithstanding, just hitting your mark and saying the lines.

I find this the cover band analogy a bit unintuitive. Anyone who practices art will tell you arts are very technical (painting is, music is, magic probably is too is).

Millions of artists have done similar subject studies; does that make everyone cover artists?

I don't know much about magic/illusions, but I would think that someone with enough technical understanding of the craft could apply the techniques originally

This is the thing that very few people understand about magic, including many aspiring magicians: there is a lot more to it than just "technical understanding". Magic is a performance art. It's a kind of acting. And you can be very good at the technical stuff and still be a terrible performer/actor. (Personally, I'm bad at both :-)

Here is my favorite example. This is one of the greatest performances of all time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_KcQt0z-eE

It looks like total chaos, and most people seeing this performance for the first time think that Dani is a master of sleight of hand, and that this performance relies on extremely difficult technical moves. In fact it is exactly the opposite. The secret "moves" are very basic -- anyone can do them, and everything that happens is actually very carefully controlled. (Dani is also a master of slight-of-hand, but that's not what this act relies on.)

This is not to say that what Dani is doing here is easy; it's not. Dani teaches a class on this one routine that lasts three hours, and there is never a dull moment (this is how I know what's going on -- I did not figure it out by myself). But it's not hard in the way that, say, juggling is hard, it's hard in the same way that good acting is hard. When it's done well it looks easy, and making it look easy is very, very hard.

Off the wall question, but: Have you watched/read Dr. Stone?

If so, what do you think of the mentalist character there?

I have not! Setting the reference aside to read it later...

This tracks. A modern artist takes themselves very seriously - which is not that different than insanity. A magician on the other hand knows it's a trick all along.

The money quote for me was

     "However, many magicians perform familiar tricks or variations of them without feeling the need to innovate.”

It's true that in our field, at least mine, we automate everything that can be automated, and are left with the hard problems, requiring to question everything including ourselves, on a daily basis. We're feeding ourselves that not good enough, every day.

At least that's the way I interpreted the article.

Something to be said about executing something with perfection without thinking too hard about it.

> "However, many magicians perform familiar tricks or variations of them without feeling the need to innovate."

Which makes these magicians craftspeople, rather than artists. Clearly some subset of magicians are actually artists, but the real takeaway is that neither the researcher nor the article author understand what makes something art.

I mean by this standard, you could write literally the exact same article about Subway Sandwich Artists.

The article also says that magicians have less mental health trouble than the general population. As a null hypothesis, I would think that the Subway Sandwich Artist will score similar to the general population?

Interestingly, the article says mathematicians also have less trouble. I guess they haven't looked into logicians, like Gödel or Russell or Cantor etc. This formal foundation of mathematics had a reputation for having mentally health challenged practitioners. Whether she attracts troubled souls or makes them, is not clear.

Why is it you feel that Bertrand Russell had mental health challenges?

Georg Cantor may not have have been anymore mentally challenged than any other 40+ year old spending the last half of their life being loudly professionally mocked and called a charlatan, corrupter of youth, abomination in the eyes of God, etc.

He copped a lot of flack for promoting unorhodox (at the time) thoughts about infinity.

There are many many logicians and set theorists, only a few make the "whackiest intellectuals" list - I personally would class Russell as well balanced, Alonzo Church as quite sensible, Dana Scott as pretty solid, . . . etc.

> Why is it you feel that Bertrand Russell had mental health challenges?

Dim recollection from what I've read. But if you ask your favourite search engine for 'bertrand russell mental health' you'll get plenty of hits. Eg https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/29/r... or https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Fitzgerald-6/pu... or https://medium.com/young-polymaths/in-their-20s-bertrand-rus...

He also had quite the family history of madness (to use a contemporary term).

Yes, for Cantor it's a bit harder to say. We can definitely find enough environmental triggers.

(Not) coincidentally, I grew up close to whither they exiled Cantor.

> There are many many logicians and set theorists, only a few make the "whackiest intellectuals" list - I personally would class Russell as well balanced, Alonzo Church as quite sensible, Dana Scott as pretty solid, . . . etc.

Well, the problem is that no one on your list has an Umlaut in their name. If you want to do really important fundamental work, that's almost a requirement.

Jokes aside, Raymond Smullyan was also a splendid fellow who did important work. And, a magician (and concert pianist), too. Just to come back to the topic of the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan

> without feeling the need to innovate.

the sibling comment mentions "craft vs art"; and thats valid.

However, some may be pursuing a different craft (or art) than the illusion.

Stupid stale stage magic makes a great framework for an original comedy routine, perhaps. The elegant craft of the "4 shows a day, 7 days a week" lounge act that is reliably entertaining for years is not something to lightly dismiss either.

It extends to programming; that people who are not facing the hard problems everyday may well still be doing valid work. The Nth re-implementation of "strings for C that suck less" or "super tight circle drawing hack for today's hot hardware" can well be Art, and can well be worthy beyond their creator's joy (tho that alone is justification enough to make them).

I suspect magicians sampled are more likely to be self employed doing something they enjoy which pays the bills, and less likely to have dreamed that they would be doing something much bigger and better.

For related reasons, I suspect contract programmers are less neurotic (etc) than founders

It is true that artists are far more likely to have come from broken families than people who are not artists. I looked for the citation but could not find it, but I know it exists. From the same study it was shown that one or both parents of scientists are far more likely to have also been scientists.

In searching for the study you remembered, I found a study whose conclusion makes a lot of intuitive sense - at least in the US, artists are much more likely to come from rich families: https://news.artnet.com/news/wealthy-people-likely-become-ar...

Thank you. That is a tasty study and is observably true.

This study starts with the baseline "There is a common perception that creativity is associated with psychopathy". Uhhhhh.... common to who? That's news to me. Most psychopaths i've met are lifeless corporate execs. I consider myself an artist and have a lot of friends who are also artistic. I've noticed no correlation.

In any case, it's obvious that the study was colored by the belief that there is legitimately an association between creativity and psychopathy, so it was flawed from the start.

It's also worth considering that there is quite an epidemic of "research papers" being published that haven't been peer reviewed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7683245/

Link to referenced study, since i couldn't find it in the article itself: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article...

> In any case, it's obvious that the study was colored by the belief that there is legitimately an association between creativity and psychopathy, so it was flawed from the start...

-------------

Granted, the author's use of the term psychopathy was a bit crass. However, the association between artists and self-destruction is an ancient one. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was perhaps the first person to write seriously about artists. He states that most artists have inherited from nature...

"...a certain element of savagery and madness, which, besides making them strange and eccentric, had brought it about that very often there was revealed in them more the obscure darkness of vice than the brightness and splendour of those virtues that make men immortal."

> Piers D. G. Britton. “Raphael and the bad humours of painters in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists*”. In: Renaissance Studies 22.2 (2008), pp. 174–196

More recently, others have written about the significant impact that syphilis-related mania had on a number of notable artists of the late 19th and early 20th century, such as Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).

> Julien Bogousslavsky and Laurent Tatu. “ ́Edouard Manet’s Tabes Dorsalis: From Painful Ataxia to Phantom Limb”. In: European Neurology 76.1-2 (2016), pp. 75–84

> Haroun Jedidi et al. “A brief history of syphilis. The disease through the art and the artist”. In: Revue medicale de Liege 73 (July 2018), pp. 363–369.

Should an artist be unfortunate enough to have lived a trauma-free life, there is a chance that he might invent one. The German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) claimed to have experienced life-threatening injuries as a fighter pilot in the second world war which had influenced the form and content of his art. However, towards the end of his life it was found that these experiences were almost entirely untrue.

> Benjamin HD Buchloh. “Beuys: the Twilight of the Idol; Preliminary Notes for a Critique”. In: Artforum 18.5 (1980), pp. 35–43.

Significantly, this revelation did not particularly affected his reputation as an artist. What does this tell us about the audience/consumer's need for an artist to be accompanied (explained?) by a myth?

Then of course, is the link between addiction and creativity. We all know of the positive and negative impact that drugs had on popular music. But did you know that the painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) was a morphine addict? And Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)?

I could go on.

Much appreciate this response, definite upvote, i found it very helpful and clarifying, however, a couple things here that strike me:

1. while all this is compelling, it doesn't change that the author of the study started off by making a statement as if it were a fact, leaving no room for alternative views. i would be shocked to find that this study has been peer reviewed and accepted.

2. the scientific definition of psychopathy is so generic and encompassing that i've long ago ignored it, when i hear psychopathy, i think of trauma that causes extremely deviant and harmful (to others) behavior, and i find that most others find there is a negative connotation associated with it in line with psychopaths being harmful to others. simply being depressed or a "tortured soul" doesn't hit the bar for a psychopath in my book. when you're good at getting people to open up, you find that by the scientific definition, we're all psychopaths. and given the current state of society, it's little wonder just about all of us are a little bit sick in the head.

From a dictionary that quickly goes from pretty much ANY mental illness to this for "psychopathy": "A personality disorder indicated by a pattern of lying, exploitation, heedlessness, arrogance, sexual promiscuity, low self-control, and lack of empathy and remorse. Violent and criminal offenses may be indicative of this disorder."

Makes no sense that people that are simply traumatized or depressed would be thrown in with this lot, but the latter are what most people think of when they think of psychopaths.

Just to add on, i live around the Boulder, Colorado area, and i can attest i've met a some creatives that show absolutely no signs of even the scientific definition of a psychopath. Totally well adjusted people that just have really cool ideas.

Also, are you a parent? Kids are about as creative as they come, making things up as they go every day. I'm constantly surprised at the things my 4 year old daughter comes up with out of thin air. Maybe she was traumatized by birth? Just so bizarre that the fundamental element of innovation would be associated with psychopathy, no matter the definition.

You make some good points.

> Kids are about as creative as they come, making things up as they go every day.

I believe that the creativity of children is an extension of their need to play. I remember my desire to draw seemed to fade away at about the same time that puberty struck.

have you considered that perhaps that desire simply didn't fade for artists? it reminds me of an artistic piece i saw in Florence, Italy back in 2013 that was of a tree suspended by wires, roots hanging out and all, and while i can't remember the exact words on the artist's sign, it amounted to when we are young we are pliable, we can easily adapt to change, and as we age we grow increasingly firm in our beliefs and incapable of adaptaption. Though it was more poetically worded towards how an older tree is more susceptible to the forces of nature. It will break before it bends.

and just to play devil's advocate for myself, perhaps the reason that artists never lose that is because of a childhood trauma that "traps" them in this creative vice? I hate to admit that this could potentially ring true for me (note that the post below this is chronologically before this one -- apparently this only appears above the first post if you're viewing on mobile vs desktop)

> perhaps the reason that artists never lose that is because of a childhood trauma that "traps" them in this creative vice?

Thats an idea that I could get behind.

Thanks for those resources, I’m going to have fun digging into those. But still, wouldn’t the link between artistry and self destruction be more a function of depression and not psychopathy?

But even that is just surface level I think. What is it that makes depressed people artists? Or vice versa.

> But still, wouldn’t the link between artistry and self destruction be more a function of depression and not psychopathy?

I agree. But to be fair to the article (and to the research which it addresses) the term 'psychopathological traits'. I'm gonna guess that we all have a few of those.

> But even that is just surface level I think. What is it that makes depressed people artists? Or vice versa.

An excellent question, and likely very hard to answer definitely. I can make a simple observation: that it is hard to imagine a work of art that does not strive for excess: excessive beauty, excessive grandeur, excessive horror etc. Hence, an artist is sort of like an astronaut of the emotions, 'boldly going' to outlying states. This job description is not amicable with peace of mind and restfulness.

This might be what attracts neurotic types to becoming artists... to exorcise whatever angels or demons keep them awake at night. Alternately, it might be a causal mechanism for turning perfectly stable artists into neurotic types.

You lost me here. To reduce all art to excess is to reduce life to excess. Art is simply expression of the experience of life, and there is absolutely no correlation between art and excess. How is the Mona Lisa an expression of excess? How are countless pieces of art from the middle ages expressions of excess? Excess is somewhat of a modern concept enabled by first world problems. Excess wasn't a problem in the past nor was it something that artists commonly expressed.

I illustrate this point to my students, who are great fans of Korean drama. These are near-hysterical operas of great excess: love unrequited, betrayal, jealously etc.

Perhaps this phenomenon can better be expressed as 'exaggeration', which is a form of excess. The fact that artists exaggerate upon nature is an observable fact. My own work on color contrast proves this fairly conclusively.

The Mona Lisa is an exaggeration of foreground/background contrast, of the-pose-at-rest vs dynamic tension, of feminine beauty juxtaposed with the beauty of nature etc.

Alternatively, most magicians are intimately familiar with psychology and more knowledgable on how to appear as they wish in a context where appearance is being measured...

Since you know, that's their job.

Alternatively, most magicians are intimately familiar with psychology and more knowledgable on how the brain is untrustworthy and subjective experience is a suggested hallucination therefore less likely to take it seriously enough to produce conditions, unlike most.

Alternatively, treating anything visualized as a truth is probably a bad idea.

If that's all it was, then why magicians specifically? Wouldn't that apply to all performing arts (musicians, actors, sales representatives, newscasters, etc)?

Performing arts is about showing, where magic is about manipulation. Magicians need to go one level deeper.

I think sales representatives come closer to it, though manipulation is not required or a desired practice. Standup comedians could be another slightly similar job.

Comedians aren't known for their happiness, though, quite the opposite.

Magicians are necessarily inoculated against believing their own bullshit.

Because the other performing arts don’t require a deep understanding of (some aspects of) human psychology to be good.

I am not sure if I should read your sentence as sarcasm. Because of its context i will interpret it straight.

Acting requires a deep understanding of human psychology. If i would have to bet who can pretend to be anything better, an actor or a magician I would bet on the actor every time.

Though eg method acting tries to make the simulation less required?

I don't see how that changes anything? Actors pretend to be what they are not, and pretend to be in situations they are not. That is their job. Yes, method acting is one way out of many how they achieve this.

Just so we are on the same page recap of the discussion:

Observation: Magicians are less prone to mental disorders than other artists

Hypothesis1: Maybe they are not less prone, but better at hiding their mental disorders.

Follow on hypothesis2: Maybe they are better at hiding their mental disorders because they are more knowledgeable about psychology.

Now, how you check for this hypothesis is that you design a study which weeds out the truth. So it must be understood when I write my counter argument that it is speculation. It is in the absence of hard data. If anyone has evidence pointing either way that should trump such speculation.

Counterpoint to hypothesis1: There are other artist who we would expect to be just as good or even better to be pretending to be "okay". For example actors. So it feels unlikely to be just up to ability to pretend to be ok.

This is where the conversation was before your comment. Then you wrote what you wrote, which I interpret as "but some actors method act!" Is that a counterpoint to the counterpoint? Is that an alternate hypothesis? If so could you spell it out please? Sorry if this sounds harsh, I'm just trying to understand the argument you are making.

On the other hand people with personality disorders (depending on which one) can be very manipulative while still being self destructive.

I think being able to use psychology agaibst others does not imply self-awareness.

Wouldn't actors be at the top then?

doctors can have huge blind spots that they fail to recognize. It's not because you are super smart and knowledgeable that you can't use a dose of humility

Some of the most sensible and (to me) sane famous people are magicians. Penn and Teller. James Randi (RIP). Derren Brown.

There's something about being able to see through bullshit which is valuable for mental health.

I’ve always found self-deception to be the true art of happiness.

Something like, strategic ignorance. Or strategic re-framing.

Yes, some researchers argue that depression causes people to see things more realistically.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/202002...

I call it deliberate self-delusion. It's incredibly powerful.

Aberystwyth University is a gem of a school on the Welsh west coast, and encourages interesting research like this.

Here are more Aberystwyth innovation stories if you're curious...

https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/rbi/research/aber-research/150-res...

this homestly sounds like the type of study that wont replicate when tried again

Magical thinking FTW!

"We Demand To Be Taken Seriously!" -The Alliance of Magicians

https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/The_Alliance_of_...

A Magician named GOB:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmVp7QZAXbs

Wouldn't you expect a mind that is able to trick other minds, to be work better than at least average. It seems like it's self selecting. It's like saying marathon runners are less prone to obesity than other athletes. To be a professional marathon runner, you probably start with better than average genetics.

A magician gets to stop being Xmo the Magnificent at the end of the show and be a normal person the rest of the time.

An artist has no such separation between themselves as normal people and themselves as the artist. So if time as an artist isn't going well, it's pretty rough bearing it as a normal person.

> An artist has no such separation between themselves as normal people and themselves as the artist.

Not necessarily. Eg I'm fairly sure Banksy can just go and enjoy a pint at their local pub without being an artist 24/7.

That's a good point, but he's also kept himself pretty secretive to allow for that. I have a feeling there are a lot more normal people artists than there are well known ones. For instance, my wife is an artist and suffers from OCD and anxiety. It affects her in both the art and life, but she feels affected as a person when her art has a "flaw" she missed. It kind of warps her sense of self because her art is "part of her" in a way, and I'm sure she's not the only artist with these issues.

Well, that seems more a consequence of OCD than consequence of being an artist?

Possibly, but the article is about magicians being less susceptible to mental disorders than "other artists" so a related question could be "Is my wife an artist because she has mental disorder conducive to creativity?"

... No wonder. They can make the mental disorders *puff* disappear.. just like me.. *puff*... *gone*

It's because they focus on a broader and more varied medium (stagecraft, devices, sleight of hand, reading people...) vs other artists (sitting in a room for hours focusing intensely upon little dabs of paint/clay/sound/code/text...).

That's my guess.

Magicians can spend just as many many hours sitting in a room focusing intensely on the skillful manipulation of small coins or playing cards, but they also have to constantly interact directly with their audiences, perform their shows publicly, and manage their career (advertising, booking shows, designing stage/street performances) so my guess is that magicians with major mental disorders are much less likely to be successful than other types of artists like a musician or a painter.

If they're skilled enough and can still put out work painters and musicians can be pretty damn crazy, and are sometimes even expected to be a little eccentric, but a magician who comes off as mentally unhinged risks making people uncomfortable and they aren't going to get work. To be a magician you have to make people feel comfortable enough to approach you, or even let you put them into a box and saw them in half. A painter doesn't need the charisma it takes to pull in and hold a crowd.

Did they study a lot of professions? Just by chance one of them can incur into a type I error.

The paper mainly concerns itself with a sample of magicians vs another of the general population (with matching age, sex, etc). The second part compares magicians with artists, actors, comedians, poets, musicians, and a general population.

Personally the most suspicious part about this is the O-LIFE questionnaire; it tests for things like "unusual experiences", "cognitive disorganisation", "impulsive nonconformity", "Introvertive anhedonia", and a bunch of other things that are reminiscent of all the non-replicable personality research from a decade ago.

O-LIFE was developed in 1995, well before replication crisis questions started popping up, so who knows.

Yeah it sounds like p-hacking to me. Would be nice if they had preregistered the study design.

However, the article does say it was a "study of magicians", not a study of medical data from the general population.

Perhaps because it’s easier to “make it” as a magician. As a wannabe photographer, it’s exhausting trying to build an audience/clientele, manage your social media presence, get accepted into local art shows or crawls, etc. all while still building your craft and buying the gear. I don’t know what it takes to get to a satisfactory level of being a magician, but I imagine you can at least get a few shows with family/friends right away.

As I was writing that (still going to keep for posterity’s sake), I’ve realized maybe it’s because there’s much more play in their art. It’s very whimsical.

Here is the paper:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article...

To my surprise this passes my quick rule of thumb test for having to pay attention: the subject group larger than 60 (195 magicians not less).

There must be some trick to it.

Smells like an instance of https://xkcd.com/882/

Mental Disorders or labels applied to distressed people who have no support system?

Either way, the research would be useful. If you can figure out why some people have more of a support system than others, that would also be exciting.

(Or alternatively, why having a support system drives you to become a magician. Or perhaps there's a third factor that causes both? Or perhaps it's a spurious correlation that doesn't replicate?)

Ultimately if you want my opinion it is a matter of community and law reform in regards to certain things to be honest...

Well, that would be something to investigate.

There's lots of stuff that sounds good when you say it, but it's harder to judge whether it'll work in practice or how well.

Who says magicians are artists? I have never heard anyone say that. But, I guess if we're calling people "prompt engineers" then these superlatives don't mean much anymore.

Note: stage magicians, and not occult practitioners.

That would be an interesting study though. For true occult practitioners I think you’re likely to see even less mental disorders since (if they are true students of the occult) they would understand that the mind (and indeed EVERY aspect of 3D reality) is simply a construct of belief systems.

There's some I've ran across that are much worse than average. The 2 I've seen are:

1. Magusitis: thinking you're some grandaster bla-de-bla, and that you can do anything. Basically, self destructive going to your head.

2. Divination paralysis : becoming so hesitant to live life, and instead doing tarot/pendulums/etc for any question, no matter how trivial. Those types do nothing out of FOMO, and therefore make the fear that they missed out, causing more of it.

Are True Occult Practitioners related to True Scotsmen?

If you work with the occult, then you're an occult practitioner.

Where you are on that journey is your business alone.

A once in a lifetime headline and you go with the safe one?

What would be the other one?

Magicians pull sanity out of their hat.

Magicians less likely to do mind tricks.

Magicians are not disillusional after all.

And for my next trick...mental well-being.

Etc etc

So many possibilities and they went with the most boring one.

I find this to be a very strange thing to study. Wouldn't the time be better spent on something else? Or were they just looking for something to do. Or was this to make better TV news headlines.

Publish or perish?

Though for this specific study: understanding mental health might help us find ways to help people with mental health. Or at least might help us do less of the harmful kind of 'help' we might currently practice.

It's hard to do controlled experiments on people, so we often resort to observational data and, if we are lucky, natural experiments.

> The study suggests that mental health profiles for magicians are akin to those of mathematicians and scientists. Crasson said precision was an important part of magic.

Which reminds me of Raymond Smullyan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan

If it's causation one way, maybe teaching people magic could be a low-risk treatment for mental disorders.

If it's causation the other way, we might wonder why more ordered people choose some careers or hobbies over others.

Maybe it would look that way if you lack the context that supports it being a sensible progression from some nearby finding that raised questions along these lines.

> Wouldn't the time be better spent on something else?

Studying what makes people feel better vs what makes them feel worse is in some sense the only important thing to study.

psychiatrists hate magicians for this one weird trick

Maybe they’re just better at concealing it?

Because nobody is going to be a starving magician. I assume if you know sleight of hand you have the skills to feed yourself. ;)

Total idle speculation: magicians are more likely to be skeptics, and therefore less prone to madness of crowds or self-deceit.

Because they studied at MIT

Magicians Institute of Teaneck

Direct link to study: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

I skimmed through the paper, and I wish there was a nicer way of saying it, but this is the kind of bullshit non-replicable study that got kicked off the replication crisis in psychology. It really reminds me of the significant xkcd (https://xkcd.com/882/, if you test every colour of jellybeans/creative profession for p<0.05, eventually you'll find a jellybean colour/profession that's associated with acne/disorders).

Select quotes:

> A sample of 195 magicians and 233 people from the general population completed measures of schizotypal traits (Oxford– Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences) and autism (Abridged Version of the Autism-Spectrum Quotient), as well as the Short Scale of Creative Self. Magicians were also compared with other creative groups with respect to schizotypal traits, based on previously published data.

One of the co-authors is a magician:

> All magicians’ contacts were made by the third author, who served at the time as the Resourceress of the Society of American Magicians

I couldn't find where they found the same statistics for other creative professions. Did they pull it out of another study? I can't tell.

> Our study demonstrates that not all creative people are created equal. Magicians scored significantly lower than the general population and other vocational creative groups on most psychopathological traits, particularly those related to schizotypy

Perhaps it only seems that way because they are better at deceiving doctors and researchers.

Bibbity Bobbity Boo No symptoms of depression for you!

What would the advantage of that be? Seems like they wouldn’t have incentive to do that.

GP is likely joking; it wouldn't make sense for a magician to deceive a doctor, but the stereotype of magicians working tricks and illusions into random and/or inappropriate situations suggests a type of person that might characterize masking their depression as if doing so is a magic trick.

I don’t trust any soft science research. Hard science had a replication issue too but it’s way easier to find issues and run numbers. Psychology especially as a field is full of nonsense that may as well be alternative medicine

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Same. This basically amounts to "one afternoon we got 200 people to answer surveys that were a tiny more like this than like that".

The way to do this in my opinion would be to go over mental disorder demographics and see if any profession is underrepresented in actual cases compared to the prevalence of the job in the overall population.

This is like finding the most dangerous jobs by surveying people instead of looking at injury rates at work.

>The way to do this in my opinion would be to go over mental disorder demographics and see if any profession is underrepresented in actual cases compared to the prevalence of the job in the overall population.

I don't think that would get you any better data. Access to the care to get diagnosed in the first place isn't equally distributed, so some groups are going to be a much better sampling of their actual population than others.

It’s interesting that this also correlates with magicians being less likely to get laid than other artists.

Not an expert, but I feel like magicians are near the top. Sure they might lose out to musicians and actors, but they should at the very least beat out sculptors, painters, struggling authors, and those weird photographers that gather up random people off the street, photograph them naked and then call it art.

Someone hasn't heard of Gob Bluth

Michael: "So this is the magic trick, huh?"

G.O.B."Illusion, Michael. A trick is something a whore does for money..."

"...or cocaine!"

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