Penn and Teller explain sleight of hand in three minutes

Penn and Teller's explanation of sleight of hand is delightful. You get the whole lecture in about three minutes. As entertaining as this video is, it could also serve to remind us of a set of principles by which humans deceive each others through fallacious and misleading arguments. Because we are creatures of limited attention and growing fatigue, we are vulnerable to cognitive misdirection much as we are vulnerable to prestidigitation. For more on human attentional limitations, see here. Further, I have given considerable thought to the idea that much human decision-making could be explained in terms of attentional limitations. For more, see this paper I wrote in 1996.

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