I saw Penn & Teller's show about ESP last night. Be­sides be­ing hi­lar­i­ous, a throw­away com­ment (by Pen­n, of course) made me think.

Here's what he said (give or take a word):

Telepa­thy is com­mu­ni­cat­ing your thoughts di­rect­ly to some­one else's brain. Be­cause it seems talk­ing is too much work.

And it got me think­ing... why would any­one want to be a telepath? What's the prac­ti­cal pur­pose of telepa­thy?

In this anec­dote I see one of the two prob­lems with telepa­thy. The fact that it's not nec­es­sary.

It's sup­posed to be a mech­a­nism for com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Well, as Penn said, you can talk, so there are al­ter­na­tives. There must be a com­pelling rea­son why telepa­thy would be bet­ter. Let's con­sid­er some pa­ram­e­ters of com­mu­ni­ca­tion qual­i­ty!

• Re­li­a­­bil­i­­ty of con­nec­­tion

I don't ex­pect any­one will tell me telepa­thy is more re­li­able than a cell phone. At least not in the forms ESP re­search has any hope of find­ing.

If there were a re­al­ly re­li­able telepath, he would have been found al­ready. Un­less he knows he's been sought, and us­es his telepa­thy to hide him­self ;-)

• Range

Well... let's look at the al­ter­na­tive! Satel­lite phones. They work (worked?) any­where on earth. Sure­ly telepa­thy's ad­van­tage over that would be marginal? And Irid­i­um went bankrup­t, so there was not much de­mand for that, ei­ther.

• Re­li­a­­bil­i­­ty of sig­­nal

By this I mean the odds of get­ting what the oth­er guy is send­ing.

I sup­pose if telepaths trans­mit the thought in its raw for­m, in­ter­pret­ing it on the oth­er side is go­ing to be quite hard.

Take me, for ex­am­ple. As a side ef­fect of how I learnt en­glish, al­most ev­ery con­scious thought I have is in my head in span­ish and in eng­lish. At the same time.

I lit­er­al­ly have eng­lish dub­bing run­ning full­time in my head. That's got­ta be an­noy­ing!

Even with­out that, it takes me some ef­fort to un­der­stand what I'm think­ing. And I re­al­ly know me!

Please sug­gest oth­er para­menters in the com­ments if you wan­t!

Now, I have a strong sus­pi­cion about why peo­ple want to be­lieve in telepa­thy, and I think they fall in two camp­s.

• Those who want to read what you think with­­out you know­ing it (or in­­ten­­tion­al­­ly shar­ing it).

This is some sort of puerile voyeuris­tic fan­ta­sy, like dream­ing of be­ing in­vis­i­ble (y­ou know why they want that, right? ;-)

Prob­a­bly the rea­son why the US gov­ern­ment used to throw away mon­ey pay­ing ESP re­searcher­s.

• The patho­log­i­­cal­­ly shy

They want you to re­al­ly un­der­stand what they think, so you will un­der­stand and like and love them.

Well, that's all find and dandy, but it's per­haps eas­i­er to ac­tu­al­ly ex­press your­self in­stead of dream­ing about hav­ing a ESP ca­pa­bil­i­ty you will nev­er have?

I feel some ten­der­ness for these mal­ad­just­ed guys, most­ly be­cause I used to be one, and I still am in some ways.

But I have learned a few things since then. No, they will not like you if they un­der­stand you. Or maybe yes. But it's not guar­an­teed. So, be a nicer guy in­stead of dream­ing of telepa­thy. Start un­der­stand­ing them, even!

Warn­ing, sil­ly pseu­do-bud­dhist anec­dote:

The Bud­dha saw one of his dis­ci­ples cross a riv­er walk­ing over the wa­ter. He con­grat­u­lat­ed him, then gave the dis­ci­ple a coin and told him: use this to pay the fer­ry­man next time.

A mir­a­cle that on­ly does the same you get for a coin is a mir­a­cle that's worth a coin.

Telepa­thy is a mir­a­cle worth 20 bucks a month for 500 min­utes or what­ev­er your cell plan is.