This is all Good News for aspiring Astrologists. In order to be the very best astrologist you only need to believe you are. This will save many countless hours.
Fun article, but it's really just shooting fish in a barrel now. I learned how to do psychic reading, astrology, and Tarot a few years back, it was quite amusing, and got very good at it. There is a very simple system which allows you to use a raft of ambiguous statements (all three are homomorphic, a nice word) since all they do is create suggestions which are either so broad they apply to everything, or they are non-falsifiable.
"My moon is in Pisces, so I may be up for travel, or paradoxically staying at home more than usual."
That's called a rainbow statement, where you make two opposite propositions and claim both are true.
"Ahh, Pisces in the fourth house. I see something significant with the letter P in your life, a person place or thing?" Yes. I have a penis, and it's significant to me. That's a sort of blind statement. There are 40-50 such statement styles, all neatly categorized in a nice book called "The Full Facts Guide to Cold Reading". That book in turn was mentioned in a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker called "Dangerous Minds" you and find here ( https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/dangerous-minds&ved=2ahUKEwiwr8npv5aIAxWG4ckDHTCDMS0QFnoECAMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2Z69pHEjPknKo1d1vktsXo ). The other system which is like Astrology (Psychics and Tarotists) is FBI criminal profiling, Quantico style, CSI - (Miami, Vegas, whatever) style. The trick is when you are a psychiatrist you give the FBI people generic descriptions of the criminal (They are between 30 and 60. They are an introvert. They have a blue-collar job ) with of course match 80% of the population. The trick is to make a very specific claim (They will wear a double-breasted suit when arrested - buttoned up!) or - actually - make dozens of specific claims, blank paper loves the ink. The ones which are right, are remembered, the one which are wrong are forgotten.
The article is apposite, and makes the simple statement that these predictions are as accurate as random chance.
Science claims that if you drop a cannonball and a peanut off the top of the Tower of Pisa, they both hit the ground at the same time. Science is the science of accurate predictions.
Pseudo-science basically is the definition of science which fails to predict anything.
Someday, ask a psychiatrist how they can tell if a random given trans person is delusional or not. They stutter and sputter, but they cannot. They will admit that trans could be delusional (do you think?) but it's hard to assess. It's not hard to see that someone who thinks they are a tree, or missing legs, or is the second coming of Christ is delusional. It's also not hard to see a man who things they are a woman is delusional. But the science of psychiatry cannot predict whether a man who thinks they are a woman is actually delusional, or "real". That means the psychiatry of trans is a pseudo-science since it cannot by any known method discern whether a man who claims to be a woman is delusional, is lying, or "really is". It predicts nothing, it cannot predict any outcomes of 'treatment' by any known method, and as such is a complete fabrication.
Not unlike psychiatric 'criminal profiling', and not unlike Tarot cards, Astrology, Psychic readings, phrenology, and a host of other pseudo-sciences.
Do read the New Yorker piece, and definitely get "The Full Facts Guide to Cold Reading". You too can learn what the Russian Dolls Ruse is, and be able to dazzle people with your Rainbow ruses.
Not to pick nits but the image suggests that looking thru a telescope is somehow related to astrology which is ... well I dunno, as an amateur astronomer maybe I'm overly sensitive about it but ... it's slander. The last thing in the world an astrologer would do is spend time with real astronomy and visa versa.
The only way astrology "works" (and it can have value!) is that a person's chart and the interpretation of it can be an aid to the person's understanding themself. Because the chart is linked to one's moment of birth, it feels unique and special, but your study demonstrates that virtually ANY astrological chart could be presented to the person and would be just as useful. (Or would it? Is there some synchronicity at work in that the person gets the chart, or A chart, they need? 😂 Hope springs eternal!)
The insights derived from contemplating one's chart can be useful in much the same way as, opening any book to any page, you can find something so meaningful to you you believe it is a personal message from the cosmos.
You hit on something there. Like palmistry or tea leaf reading, the 'method' is simply there to aid the person in opening their minds a little bit. It's a sort of placebo.
This is what I think about Tarot cards as well! It is more important what the person sees in the thing than the thing itself. Like Rorschach tests. Is it confirmation bias? Sure. But it also can help reveal something from your mind that you haven't been paying attention to. Simply because you are looking for it. It's basically a mirror. And then you have to ask yourself. Is this true of all psychological tests???
Also. It’s a useful framework for looking at world. Like a swot analysis. It’s not the whole picture. But it gives you a way to frame up people’s personalities and informs how you might best respect differences and modify your interactions. Plus unlike other personality tests, its ubiquity helps shortcut explanations and understanding.
I like this study. However, I find the headline misleading. " Does Astrology Work?" This title is inappropriate given that the article then says "...[we looked at] Western Astrology—testing other types of astrology and other charting methods was beyond the scope of this study." Then that means the study cannot answer if Astrology works, just (at best) whether one subset of Astrology works. One cannot examine one or a few things (like drawing a conclusion that all fruits are sweet after only eating bananas and pears).
That being said, I do wonder if the performances on questions 2, 3 and 6 were coincidence. I also am interested in seeing a study on non-western astrologer predictions. Great study. My only major criticism is about the headline. Minor comment is that the first vertical bar chart legend is a bit confusing, though I understood it. My concern is people might misinterpret it to be like a parity bar graph. I might consider labeling it as "Pre-survey participant confidence" and "Post-survey participant confidence" or something like that. Or Maybe something like "Participant Confidence Directly Before Conducting Astrological Assessments" and "Participant Confidence Directly After Conducting Astrological Assessments"
I think that is Chinese Astrology, specifically. I don't think that exists in Indian Astrology. So there are at least two major Astrology systems left out of this study.
This had me remembering a 538 article about the effect of birth month on processional athletic careers—a much more pedestrian causality or correlation.
Astrology neither originated on a best fit with the available evidence foundation nor acquired such a foundation at anytime since its origin. Therefore the notion that it has factual validity or integrity is a non-starter. Even if the astrologers all identified the “correct” charts for the question responses, that would merely demonstrate that there is an agreed upon one to one mapping of the question answers to a chart, it would do nothing to confer any substance to astrology’s factual assertions. Insofar as astrology’s factual assertions are not well defined, that lack of definition is in and of itself sufficient reason to dismiss astrology as lacking substance. The inability of astrologers to agree on the correct charts demonstrates that, at least in practice, chart based astrology is ill-defined. Serious astrologers should be deeply disturbed by that result, so insofar as astrologers respond by dismissing that result, they are revealing themselves to not be deserving of being taken seriously.
If you think western astrology is only about birth charts, and birth charts are about personality - well, I'd have to agree with you that it's pretty useless.
If you really want to do a proper study - if you want to understand what astrology can do - read the medievals, because that's when the astrological art hit its peak.
Astrology was given to us to see the future. Usually not through birth charts - there's a whole world out there and ways of charting it.
There are ways to chart whether you'll get a pay rise this year, or if a malevolent dictator is about to take over the country you live in.
All sorts of things. The personality stuff didn't come into real favour until the mid-twentieth century, maybe a bit earlier - when sun-sign columns got popular.
Okay, enough, I could write a book on this - but not in a comments section!
I'd suggest you work with it. Do your predictions come to pass? Horary is, overall, the most useful form of astrology for most of us. Will I get the job? Should I move across country? Will I find my lost dog?, that kind of thing.
How could you actually expect to know someone's personality by their sun-sign? I don't get it. Grantrd, we're all human, but I don’t think we can all be readily slotted into 12 types based on what time of year we were born.
Sort of like psychiatry, in other words. Psychoanalysis. Clinical psychology.
I'm not going to throw the foregoing out with the bathwater, but you could create an equally harebrained "test" for the "validity" of those soft specialities and come up with similar results.
If you really wish to test your "Does Astrology Work?" idea, then instead of beginning with a highly biased, designed-to-fail survey that you made up yourselves, try querying those financial technical analysts who use planetary transits, etc., in their work. In other words, professionals in the field who work with objective results. They shouldn't be hard to find.
That's a very valid point. Like religion, there may be some truth hidden deep, deep in some of the myths that have since grown into the stories we're familiar with. As you say, being born in the summer is not the same as being born in the winter.
This is all Good News for aspiring Astrologists. In order to be the very best astrologist you only need to believe you are. This will save many countless hours.
I love that you gave voice to this awesome study!
Fun article, but it's really just shooting fish in a barrel now. I learned how to do psychic reading, astrology, and Tarot a few years back, it was quite amusing, and got very good at it. There is a very simple system which allows you to use a raft of ambiguous statements (all three are homomorphic, a nice word) since all they do is create suggestions which are either so broad they apply to everything, or they are non-falsifiable.
"My moon is in Pisces, so I may be up for travel, or paradoxically staying at home more than usual."
That's called a rainbow statement, where you make two opposite propositions and claim both are true.
"Ahh, Pisces in the fourth house. I see something significant with the letter P in your life, a person place or thing?" Yes. I have a penis, and it's significant to me. That's a sort of blind statement. There are 40-50 such statement styles, all neatly categorized in a nice book called "The Full Facts Guide to Cold Reading". That book in turn was mentioned in a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker called "Dangerous Minds" you and find here ( https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/dangerous-minds&ved=2ahUKEwiwr8npv5aIAxWG4ckDHTCDMS0QFnoECAMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2Z69pHEjPknKo1d1vktsXo ). The other system which is like Astrology (Psychics and Tarotists) is FBI criminal profiling, Quantico style, CSI - (Miami, Vegas, whatever) style. The trick is when you are a psychiatrist you give the FBI people generic descriptions of the criminal (They are between 30 and 60. They are an introvert. They have a blue-collar job ) with of course match 80% of the population. The trick is to make a very specific claim (They will wear a double-breasted suit when arrested - buttoned up!) or - actually - make dozens of specific claims, blank paper loves the ink. The ones which are right, are remembered, the one which are wrong are forgotten.
The article is apposite, and makes the simple statement that these predictions are as accurate as random chance.
Science claims that if you drop a cannonball and a peanut off the top of the Tower of Pisa, they both hit the ground at the same time. Science is the science of accurate predictions.
Pseudo-science basically is the definition of science which fails to predict anything.
Someday, ask a psychiatrist how they can tell if a random given trans person is delusional or not. They stutter and sputter, but they cannot. They will admit that trans could be delusional (do you think?) but it's hard to assess. It's not hard to see that someone who thinks they are a tree, or missing legs, or is the second coming of Christ is delusional. It's also not hard to see a man who things they are a woman is delusional. But the science of psychiatry cannot predict whether a man who thinks they are a woman is actually delusional, or "real". That means the psychiatry of trans is a pseudo-science since it cannot by any known method discern whether a man who claims to be a woman is delusional, is lying, or "really is". It predicts nothing, it cannot predict any outcomes of 'treatment' by any known method, and as such is a complete fabrication.
Not unlike psychiatric 'criminal profiling', and not unlike Tarot cards, Astrology, Psychic readings, phrenology, and a host of other pseudo-sciences.
Do read the New Yorker piece, and definitely get "The Full Facts Guide to Cold Reading". You too can learn what the Russian Dolls Ruse is, and be able to dazzle people with your Rainbow ruses.
Not to pick nits but the image suggests that looking thru a telescope is somehow related to astrology which is ... well I dunno, as an amateur astronomer maybe I'm overly sensitive about it but ... it's slander. The last thing in the world an astrologer would do is spend time with real astronomy and visa versa.
The only way astrology "works" (and it can have value!) is that a person's chart and the interpretation of it can be an aid to the person's understanding themself. Because the chart is linked to one's moment of birth, it feels unique and special, but your study demonstrates that virtually ANY astrological chart could be presented to the person and would be just as useful. (Or would it? Is there some synchronicity at work in that the person gets the chart, or A chart, they need? 😂 Hope springs eternal!)
The insights derived from contemplating one's chart can be useful in much the same way as, opening any book to any page, you can find something so meaningful to you you believe it is a personal message from the cosmos.
You hit on something there. Like palmistry or tea leaf reading, the 'method' is simply there to aid the person in opening their minds a little bit. It's a sort of placebo.
This is what I think about Tarot cards as well! It is more important what the person sees in the thing than the thing itself. Like Rorschach tests. Is it confirmation bias? Sure. But it also can help reveal something from your mind that you haven't been paying attention to. Simply because you are looking for it. It's basically a mirror. And then you have to ask yourself. Is this true of all psychological tests???
Also. It’s a useful framework for looking at world. Like a swot analysis. It’s not the whole picture. But it gives you a way to frame up people’s personalities and informs how you might best respect differences and modify your interactions. Plus unlike other personality tests, its ubiquity helps shortcut explanations and understanding.
Nicely developed!
I like this study. However, I find the headline misleading. " Does Astrology Work?" This title is inappropriate given that the article then says "...[we looked at] Western Astrology—testing other types of astrology and other charting methods was beyond the scope of this study." Then that means the study cannot answer if Astrology works, just (at best) whether one subset of Astrology works. One cannot examine one or a few things (like drawing a conclusion that all fruits are sweet after only eating bananas and pears).
That being said, I do wonder if the performances on questions 2, 3 and 6 were coincidence. I also am interested in seeing a study on non-western astrologer predictions. Great study. My only major criticism is about the headline. Minor comment is that the first vertical bar chart legend is a bit confusing, though I understood it. My concern is people might misinterpret it to be like a parity bar graph. I might consider labeling it as "Pre-survey participant confidence" and "Post-survey participant confidence" or something like that. Or Maybe something like "Participant Confidence Directly Before Conducting Astrological Assessments" and "Participant Confidence Directly After Conducting Astrological Assessments"
I would love to see a study on eastern astrology, with the zodiac signs named after animals!
I think that is Chinese Astrology, specifically. I don't think that exists in Indian Astrology. So there are at least two major Astrology systems left out of this study.
I also think of the current zeitgeist as "gender astrology."
Just as I always thought... astrology is pure bullshit.
This had me remembering a 538 article about the effect of birth month on processional athletic careers—a much more pedestrian causality or correlation.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-athletes-birthdays-affect-who-goes-pro-and-who-becomes-a-star/#:~:text=A%20study%20found%20that%2058,in%20the%20first%20six%20months.
Astrology neither originated on a best fit with the available evidence foundation nor acquired such a foundation at anytime since its origin. Therefore the notion that it has factual validity or integrity is a non-starter. Even if the astrologers all identified the “correct” charts for the question responses, that would merely demonstrate that there is an agreed upon one to one mapping of the question answers to a chart, it would do nothing to confer any substance to astrology’s factual assertions. Insofar as astrology’s factual assertions are not well defined, that lack of definition is in and of itself sufficient reason to dismiss astrology as lacking substance. The inability of astrologers to agree on the correct charts demonstrates that, at least in practice, chart based astrology is ill-defined. Serious astrologers should be deeply disturbed by that result, so insofar as astrologers respond by dismissing that result, they are revealing themselves to not be deserving of being taken seriously.
Randi would be proud!
Astrology is space racism
Random answering of questions Isn’t enough to guess the chart, people barely know themselves so their answers are highly subjective.
If you think western astrology is only about birth charts, and birth charts are about personality - well, I'd have to agree with you that it's pretty useless.
If you really want to do a proper study - if you want to understand what astrology can do - read the medievals, because that's when the astrological art hit its peak.
Astrology was given to us to see the future. Usually not through birth charts - there's a whole world out there and ways of charting it.
There are ways to chart whether you'll get a pay rise this year, or if a malevolent dictator is about to take over the country you live in.
All sorts of things. The personality stuff didn't come into real favour until the mid-twentieth century, maybe a bit earlier - when sun-sign columns got popular.
Okay, enough, I could write a book on this - but not in a comments section!
So how would you verify medieval astrology?
I'd suggest you work with it. Do your predictions come to pass? Horary is, overall, the most useful form of astrology for most of us. Will I get the job? Should I move across country? Will I find my lost dog?, that kind of thing.
How could you actually expect to know someone's personality by their sun-sign? I don't get it. Grantrd, we're all human, but I don’t think we can all be readily slotted into 12 types based on what time of year we were born.
Sort of like psychiatry, in other words. Psychoanalysis. Clinical psychology.
I'm not going to throw the foregoing out with the bathwater, but you could create an equally harebrained "test" for the "validity" of those soft specialities and come up with similar results.
If you really wish to test your "Does Astrology Work?" idea, then instead of beginning with a highly biased, designed-to-fail survey that you made up yourselves, try querying those financial technical analysts who use planetary transits, etc., in their work. In other words, professionals in the field who work with objective results. They shouldn't be hard to find.
I have similarly considered that we also have school years. A child a few months older could be enough to have more confidence on average, etc.
I was not aware of that statistic. It is interesting.
That's a very valid point. Like religion, there may be some truth hidden deep, deep in some of the myths that have since grown into the stories we're familiar with. As you say, being born in the summer is not the same as being born in the winter.