@anandamide "recreation of a psychic's con" is a magnificent turn of phrase. All the more because the sentence in which it appears also points out that the technique of cold reading can *emerge* in an interaction without any explicit intention.
I was having this conversation with my nephew last night as he told me about his newfound interest in astrology - (in a respectful way, I like to think. I love my nephew and if he's having fun with astrology I'm not going to try to ruin that for him. Heck, in my older age now, I'm just not that interested in running *anybody's* fun when it is substantially harmless and engaged with eyes wide open.)
That property of emergence without intention is a really really important one to discuss in all sorts of discussions about systemic outcomes. Not because intention is necessarily explicitly absent from systems of untruth, but because in my limited experience, conflation of outcomes with intentions is both a simple logical fallacy and also so immediately and viscerally rooted in the core of our emotions that without explicitly making space in the conversation for an absence of intention, we (again, this is 'me, and people I've talked to') can lose sight of the structure of the systems under discussion, and find ourselves arguing about assignments of blame, rather than discussing actions toward solutions.

Thank you for reading this far, if you have. I'm sorry to sealion in like this. That phrase really grabbed my attention - thank you so much for sharing.