“The Tuned Deck”, Ralph W. Hull, John N. Hilliard1994 (epistemology, cognitive bias; backlinks; similar)⁠:

[Description of a classic stage magic trick invented by Ralph Hull & published in Hilliard’s magic textbook Greater Magic. The Tuned Deck trick is more of a meta-trick, as it is most effective on stage magicians, who assume that there is only one trick being performed & each time they think they’ve figured it out, the trick is changed out for a different trick which appears to rule out the actual previous tricks. As described by Daniel Dennett in Brainstorms:

Why is the free will problem so persistent? Partly, I suspect, because it is called the free will problem. Hilliard, the great card magician, used to fool even his professional colleagues with a trick he called the tuned deck. 20× in a row he’d confound the quidnuncs, as he put it, with the same trick, a bit of prestidigitation that resisted all the diagnostic hypotheses of his fellow magicians. The trick, as he eventually revealed, was a masterpiece of subtle misdirection; it consisted entirely of the name, “the tuned deck”, plus a peculiar but obviously non-functional bit of ritual. It was, you see, many tricks, however many different but familiar tricks Hilliard had to perform in order to stay one jump ahead of the solvers. As soon as their experiments and subtle arguments had conclusively eliminated one way of doing the trick, that was the way he would do the trick on future trials. This would have been obvious to his sophisticated onlookers had they not been so intent on finding the solution to the trick.

Hilliard learned it from Hull, and his own preface goes:

Give a trick all the advantages to be derived from well thought out and acted remarks which prepare, and almost convince beforehand, the mind of the spectator of the possibility of the magical results that follow and it is then true magic. This is the philosophy of magic. It must first be understood, then practiced. The greatest tricks ever performed are not done at all. The audience simply think they see them. But the art is to make them think so.

It has been speculated that the Berglas effect card trick may be a meta-trick like the Tuned Deck.]

See Also:

• “Teller Reveals His Secrets: The smaller, quieter half of the magician duo Penn & Teller writes about how magicians manipulate the human mind”

• “A psychologically-based taxonomy of misdirection”

• “Applying insights from magic to improve deception in research: The Swiss cheese model”

• “Talking to the Dead in the Classroom: How a Supposedly Psychic Event Impacts Beliefs and Feelings”

• “Enhanced rationality in autism spectrum disorder”

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