Actually, I wasn’t thinking of this in terms of people who pass themselves off as some kind of psychic or another. I was thinking of daily life, where someone might describe a person they only knew a few things about, and get it pretty accurately.
I’m sure that both confirmation bias and cold reading have something to do with it. Although with the things I’m thinking about, it seems like cold reading is a pretty powerful process, even if you’ve never been trained in it. Maybe it’s something we all do, to one degree or another? Or at least, those who pay attention do.
Confirmation bias… not sure. I mean, of course we might only pay attention to our successful outcomes, but if those outcomes are highly unusual, then it doesn’t seem like confirmation bias could discount the knowledge. You could claim that coincidence would account for being right some of the time, and that is possible, too, although I don’t know how likely.
Similarly the vagueness of language can make us seem like we know more than we do. But just the same, the vagueness of language may equally well be masking more hits than misses. More false negatives than false positives. Even so, language can be specific enough.
I think the idea of cold reading holds the most promise. It could work at a distance, because I guess you don’t need to know much in order to make some very good guesses.