We of tend play choose your horoscope at work.
We gather free or paid newspaper and around a coffee we read the horoscopes and chose the best or the funnier.
There are various complex systems, calculations, tables and such that people use… but there is absolutely no actual empirical science that backs up any of any of them.
Therr are no plausible causal mechanisms.
There is also an immense wealth of scientific evidence showing how the predictions are uselessly inaccurate, as well as a bunch of other studies explaining how and why such vaguely worded predictions are convincing to certain kinds of people.
If there is any science to astrology, it is a science of being a scam artist, of psychological manipulation tactics.
As for the actual purported mechanisms of generating a horoscope, they often have psuedoscientific levels of complexity that fools rubes who cannot think critically:
Its complex, and I had to learn it, therefore it’s true and worthwhile!
Nevermind that it often doesn’t even make testable, falsifiable predictions, and when it does, they are not accurate, they are wrong.
Throw it out like we did with bloodletting, ‘body humors’, ‘vitalism’, trying to solve disease with sacrifices and prayer, Lamarckian evolution, etc…
Astrology is really dumb. I do have one curiosity with it. It’s a big deal for hockey players to be born early in the year to the point you find fewer pros born in December and in the later months compared to January through March born hockey professionals.
One other thing, kids have birthdays every year and if they have their parties outside that means some kids are having snowy birthday parties and others are having sunny birthdays and plenty of crossover. The kinds of interactions you have with your friends will be slightly impacted* by how much outdoor gear you have to wear, etc. (*maybe imperceptibly)
But the point is there are at least two possible differences that come depending on which month you’re born in. What if there are like a hundred of them and astrology is a really terrible way of trying to figure that out? Now I realize it’s not so maybe a better question is I wonder if there is any version of birth month based assessments, correlations, or analyses that might be fruitful or useful in some way or another.
So, yes, you are correct that the season you are born in will slightly effect the number of seasons a kid experiences.
But uh… what if you are born in a tropical monsoon climate that has no winter?
What if you are born in the other hemisphere, where the seasons are inverted?
What if you can’t afford a house, so you don’t have a yard for parties, don’t live near a park… or hockey rink?
And the biggest one: what do the actual stars have to do with this?
Say earth and the whole solar system are poofed out of the Milky Way, and into Andromeda. Solar system remains stable, all orbits the same, the Sun’s massive solar wind is strong enough to protect us from the ambient radiation of wherever we end up.
Seasons will be exactly the same. Stars will be dramatically different. … Do you think the stars being different would change… anything?
Beyond that, even back here on normal, real Earth, in the Milky Way… most Eastern astrology is based on the year you are born in. Not the month.
And also, throughout history… various cultures have kept a calendar, kept track of time… in many different ways. Solar calendars. Lunar calendars. Calendars based on the reigns of Emperors or Dynasties, calendars based off of mythical/religious stories for the origin of the universe/planet.
They also have not all recognized the same constellation patterns… as what we now recognize them as.
If you’re in the Southern hemisphere… you can’t even see many of the ones we see in the North.
…
You can try and number crunch statistical correlations between every possible variable.
Sometimes this can lead to an insight.
But to nail down why that correlation exists, to actually discover something true and useful… you also have to provide a causal mechanism that makes sense.
The object close enough to meaningfully directly affect Earth is the Moon. It causes tides, for example, alters many animal behaviors.
The only other thing is the Sun, of course, which gives the planet light and energy.
Nothing else inside of or outside of our solar system has any mechanism of directly impacting life on Earth in a regular, noticeable way…
… unless we get astounsingly unlucky and get hit by the radiation from a magnetar we somehow haven’t noticed yet, or something absurd like that.
Awesome, I didn’t reply yesterday because I had too much to say so here is a simple thank you to avert a common never-reply scenario :-)
Well, just a quick dictation, too. Apparently I forgot that stars were involved with astrology at all, so I slapped my forehead and searched YouTube. And I was hoping to find a skeptic who steel-manned astrology, but that would be pretty odd to spend your time doing such a thing if you were a skeptic. Unless, of course, it was teeing up an explanation for a teardown. But anyway, I listened to some goofball talking super seriously about astrology, and he made a claim about celebrity star charts and said that Iron Man, Robert Downey Juney, had foreseen that he would have a big change in his life. And then, sure enough, Iron Man came out and changed his career. Wow, great job, astrology. You nailed it. Once energy is just about free, and so is compute, it would be pretty easy to disprove that line of thinking by feeding the world’s celebrities into a system and analyzing all of their little charts. Anyway, I was only thinking about birth months and the idea of the positions of balls of gas having meaningful impacts on all of our lives is quite the stretch. Please excuse the lack of editing here. Thank you.
Apparently I forgot that stars were involved with astrology at all, so I slapped my forehead and searched YouTube.
LOL.
Astrology, ultimately etymylogically derives from… astron, meaning ‘star’ in Greek.
It literally means ‘study of the stars’.
hahahah!
But uh yeah, it is essentially impossible to ‘steel man’ astrology, because pretty much every practitioner of it has their own cust version of it, similar to… how one is supposed to use or read Tarot cards.
Then you’ve got a whole cottage industry of cranks, cranking out either 100% or 90% made up bullshit as their own spin on how astrology ‘works’.
Like, historically, you can trace various sort of family trees of actual astrological doctrines, but in the last 50 years, so many people have made up so much nonsense that you basically have to take any particular astrologer and ask them what they believe, because they won’t agree with another one, or they’ll just tell you that part of astrology is that it is a personal, mystical experience and practice, so there will be ‘reasonable variation of opinion’ amongst ‘experts’.
It is delusional narcissist nonsense that functions as an identity for people who have not otherwise managed to build or acquire one.
There are a lot of similarities between, and sometimes direct crossover with, actual literal cult leaders, and ‘very serious’ astrologers.
I forgot the biggest laugh of them all. This YouTube astrology dude explains some different types of astrology, including one he called mundane astrology. He explained mundane astrologers attempt to explain entire society’s behaviors and fates using the stars or astrology or whatever. And the example that he gave was COVID. And also he brought up, believe it or not, elections. And said that there’s an election astrology.
So I think there are only three possibilities.
One is that astrology, including election astrology, is super effective. And a handful of people can do it. And they’re all billionaires.
Scenario two, the same scenario, except election astrologers don’t like to mix money with their craft. And that’s why we don’t know about the 30th through 50th richest people on the planet, all being astrologers, who enjoy the betting markets, the prediction markets.
Scenario three is that we don’t see billionaire astrologers. Not because they are too ethical to mix money with sky gazing (or whatever it is), but because they’re making it all up.
So to the astrologers out there, who amongst you are billionaires thanks to owning the prediction markets every day or every election cycle? Or what kind of ethical code prevents election astrologers from using prediction markets?
I mean, when I was learning statistics and econometrics, half of my professors stressed the limitations of various kinds of mathematical predictive models… by saying that we don’t want to go from professionals to turning into astrologers.
Of course, this doesn’t stop a lot of day trader dude bros and more recently crypto day trader dude bros from convincing themselves they’ve cracked the code…
But the point here is: Actual statisticians literally use ‘astrologer’ as a derisive slur.
devil’s advocate: there are people like me who don’t take it seriously. like I enjoy talking to astrology people because listening to anyone talk about anything they’re interested in is downright entertaining, even if I personally don’t believe planetary positions have any influence on humans
I’m not gonna tell you that you shouldn’t talk to, or shouldn’t enjoying talking to astrology people.
I just have a lower threshold for bs I put up, and do not personally enjoy listening to enthusiastic yapping about absurd nonsense, I infact fact it insufferable, assuming it isn’t a child who is in the learning/development process.
Were you and I to be friends, irl or otherwise, I’d respectfully ask you to not waste my time with astrology, unless you want to have a meta or academic level discussion about … the psych tendencies/profiles of astrology believers, the actual real world history of its growth and development (which is very often completely different than what many astrology practitioners believe), how you can track the general decline of literacy and critical thinking skills and the education system by using the proliferation of astrology as a proxy…
… I would find those topics interesting.
But generally speaking, in an irl, casual conversation scenario?
Yeah my rule of thumb is that if we are just recently met and you are ardently asking me what my sign is, you’re a person I would rather not know at all.
Nothing wrong with having a filter. I suppose mine is that I won’t be friends with anyone who insists on contact through social media apps instead of regular texting (maybe Signal if they’re cool)
I also have that same additional filter as well, haha.
Maybe… we could… be friends lol?
I am so very tired of trying to explain how awful social media apps are to everyone, how they don’t realize they’re addicted to a digital drug that makes them angry, depressed and misinformed…
And then you also try to explain how to actually do online security, and they usually get angry when you tell them that all the marketing and advertisments lied to them.
Probably lol. I’d wager most of us Lemmy dorks would get along with most of us Lemmy dorks IRL or otherwise
I suppose Lemmy is social media but its non-monetary, completely-volunteer-run nature really does make it feel like a different animal. At least I’m not horribly addicted like I used to be with Reddit, anyway
Then astrology would be the equivalent of an entire belief system that functionally is so complex it essentially contitutes a religion…
Astrology would be that, but built on urban legend, pre-internet era myths about older video games, like Mew being in the back of a truck in Vermillion city.
I am at the point where if anyone, ever, for any reason, asks me what my astrological sign is, I stop communicating with them.
They always turn out to be irresponsible, narcissistic idiots every time.
An exception would if this interaction is taking place completely within the confines of an actually defined fantasy world like a video game or ttrpg.
But real life? People who actually believe there is, or could potentially be anything to astrology?
Dangerous morons.
Sooooo
Your sign? :)
Ophiuchus is usually my answer
This is the funny troll answer that tests whether or not the astrologer has modern, up to date levels of dedication to their woo woo bs.
Blawcked!
You sound like such a typical Leo
grumble grumble…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=75g0fjX0r4s
You’re lucky I have a thing for classic rock.
With pipe organs.
We of tend play choose your horoscope at work. We gather free or paid newspaper and around a coffee we read the horoscopes and chose the best or the funnier.
I’ve worked as a copy editor for a small newspaper.
You wanna know how the horoscopes are written?
Lead editor pulls them out of his ass, often laughing while doing so.
They tended to be bases on the plots of, or scenes in movies he’d recently seen, shows he was watching.
My god did that smell good
Yeah and since we laugh reading them, we do full circle XD
Yep they are literally complete bullshit and you have to be an actual moron to take them seriously…
Also I edited in more to my original comment after you replied, did not expect you to reply so fast, haha.
He I see, yeah that what i though, their can’t be science behind this. I wonder when we will start to get “AI” horoscopes.
(I am waiting to enter a music festival, nothing more to do than speak or argue with people)
There are various complex systems, calculations, tables and such that people use… but there is absolutely no actual empirical science that backs up any of any of them.
Therr are no plausible causal mechanisms.
There is also an immense wealth of scientific evidence showing how the predictions are uselessly inaccurate, as well as a bunch of other studies explaining how and why such vaguely worded predictions are convincing to certain kinds of people.
If there is any science to astrology, it is a science of being a scam artist, of psychological manipulation tactics.
As for the actual purported mechanisms of generating a horoscope, they often have psuedoscientific levels of complexity that fools rubes who cannot think critically:
Its complex, and I had to learn it, therefore it’s true and worthwhile!
Nevermind that it often doesn’t even make testable, falsifiable predictions, and when it does, they are not accurate, they are wrong.
Throw it out like we did with bloodletting, ‘body humors’, ‘vitalism’, trying to solve disease with sacrifices and prayer, Lamarckian evolution, etc…
My wife makes a newspaper about me for my birthday every year. She makes the horoscopes too and that’s one of the most entertaining parts for her.
Astrology is really dumb. I do have one curiosity with it. It’s a big deal for hockey players to be born early in the year to the point you find fewer pros born in December and in the later months compared to January through March born hockey professionals.
One other thing, kids have birthdays every year and if they have their parties outside that means some kids are having snowy birthday parties and others are having sunny birthdays and plenty of crossover. The kinds of interactions you have with your friends will be slightly impacted* by how much outdoor gear you have to wear, etc. (*maybe imperceptibly)
But the point is there are at least two possible differences that come depending on which month you’re born in. What if there are like a hundred of them and astrology is a really terrible way of trying to figure that out? Now I realize it’s not so maybe a better question is I wonder if there is any version of birth month based assessments, correlations, or analyses that might be fruitful or useful in some way or another.
Ok you seem genuienly curious here, lemme try.
So, yes, you are correct that the season you are born in will slightly effect the number of seasons a kid experiences.
But uh… what if you are born in a tropical monsoon climate that has no winter?
What if you are born in the other hemisphere, where the seasons are inverted?
What if you can’t afford a house, so you don’t have a yard for parties, don’t live near a park… or hockey rink?
And the biggest one: what do the actual stars have to do with this?
Say earth and the whole solar system are poofed out of the Milky Way, and into Andromeda. Solar system remains stable, all orbits the same, the Sun’s massive solar wind is strong enough to protect us from the ambient radiation of wherever we end up.
Seasons will be exactly the same. Stars will be dramatically different. … Do you think the stars being different would change… anything?
Beyond that, even back here on normal, real Earth, in the Milky Way… most Eastern astrology is based on the year you are born in. Not the month.
And also, throughout history… various cultures have kept a calendar, kept track of time… in many different ways. Solar calendars. Lunar calendars. Calendars based on the reigns of Emperors or Dynasties, calendars based off of mythical/religious stories for the origin of the universe/planet.
They also have not all recognized the same constellation patterns… as what we now recognize them as.
If you’re in the Southern hemisphere… you can’t even see many of the ones we see in the North.
…
You can try and number crunch statistical correlations between every possible variable.
Sometimes this can lead to an insight.
But to nail down why that correlation exists, to actually discover something true and useful… you also have to provide a causal mechanism that makes sense.
The object close enough to meaningfully directly affect Earth is the Moon. It causes tides, for example, alters many animal behaviors.
The only other thing is the Sun, of course, which gives the planet light and energy.
Nothing else inside of or outside of our solar system has any mechanism of directly impacting life on Earth in a regular, noticeable way…
… unless we get astounsingly unlucky and get hit by the radiation from a magnetar we somehow haven’t noticed yet, or something absurd like that.
Awesome, I didn’t reply yesterday because I had too much to say so here is a simple thank you to avert a common never-reply scenario :-)
Well, just a quick dictation, too. Apparently I forgot that stars were involved with astrology at all, so I slapped my forehead and searched YouTube. And I was hoping to find a skeptic who steel-manned astrology, but that would be pretty odd to spend your time doing such a thing if you were a skeptic. Unless, of course, it was teeing up an explanation for a teardown. But anyway, I listened to some goofball talking super seriously about astrology, and he made a claim about celebrity star charts and said that Iron Man, Robert Downey Juney, had foreseen that he would have a big change in his life. And then, sure enough, Iron Man came out and changed his career. Wow, great job, astrology. You nailed it. Once energy is just about free, and so is compute, it would be pretty easy to disprove that line of thinking by feeding the world’s celebrities into a system and analyzing all of their little charts. Anyway, I was only thinking about birth months and the idea of the positions of balls of gas having meaningful impacts on all of our lives is quite the stretch. Please excuse the lack of editing here. Thank you.
LOL.
Astrology, ultimately etymylogically derives from… astron, meaning ‘star’ in Greek.
It literally means ‘study of the stars’.
hahahah!
But uh yeah, it is essentially impossible to ‘steel man’ astrology, because pretty much every practitioner of it has their own cust version of it, similar to… how one is supposed to use or read Tarot cards.
Then you’ve got a whole cottage industry of cranks, cranking out either 100% or 90% made up bullshit as their own spin on how astrology ‘works’.
Like, historically, you can trace various sort of family trees of actual astrological doctrines, but in the last 50 years, so many people have made up so much nonsense that you basically have to take any particular astrologer and ask them what they believe, because they won’t agree with another one, or they’ll just tell you that part of astrology is that it is a personal, mystical experience and practice, so there will be ‘reasonable variation of opinion’ amongst ‘experts’.
It is delusional narcissist nonsense that functions as an identity for people who have not otherwise managed to build or acquire one.
There are a lot of similarities between, and sometimes direct crossover with, actual literal cult leaders, and ‘very serious’ astrologers.
I forgot the biggest laugh of them all. This YouTube astrology dude explains some different types of astrology, including one he called mundane astrology. He explained mundane astrologers attempt to explain entire society’s behaviors and fates using the stars or astrology or whatever. And the example that he gave was COVID. And also he brought up, believe it or not, elections. And said that there’s an election astrology.
So I think there are only three possibilities.
One is that astrology, including election astrology, is super effective. And a handful of people can do it. And they’re all billionaires.
Scenario two, the same scenario, except election astrologers don’t like to mix money with their craft. And that’s why we don’t know about the 30th through 50th richest people on the planet, all being astrologers, who enjoy the betting markets, the prediction markets.
Scenario three is that we don’t see billionaire astrologers. Not because they are too ethical to mix money with sky gazing (or whatever it is), but because they’re making it all up.
So to the astrologers out there, who amongst you are billionaires thanks to owning the prediction markets every day or every election cycle? Or what kind of ethical code prevents election astrologers from using prediction markets?
I mean, when I was learning statistics and econometrics, half of my professors stressed the limitations of various kinds of mathematical predictive models… by saying that we don’t want to go from professionals to turning into astrologers.
Of course, this doesn’t stop a lot of day trader dude bros and more recently crypto day trader dude bros from convincing themselves they’ve cracked the code…
But the point here is: Actual statisticians literally use ‘astrologer’ as a derisive slur.
And they are correct to do so, imo, lol.
devil’s advocate: there are people like me who don’t take it seriously. like I enjoy talking to astrology people because listening to anyone talk about anything they’re interested in is downright entertaining, even if I personally don’t believe planetary positions have any influence on humans
Lots of people doing something for fun but not taking it seriously is just an advertisement for people that will take it seriously.
Astrology has one major and tangible benefit - it lets you easily remember when roughly are people’s birthdays coming up.
I’m not gonna tell you that you shouldn’t talk to, or shouldn’t enjoying talking to astrology people.
I just have a lower threshold for bs I put up, and do not personally enjoy listening to enthusiastic yapping about absurd nonsense, I infact fact it insufferable, assuming it isn’t a child who is in the learning/development process.
Were you and I to be friends, irl or otherwise, I’d respectfully ask you to not waste my time with astrology, unless you want to have a meta or academic level discussion about … the psych tendencies/profiles of astrology believers, the actual real world history of its growth and development (which is very often completely different than what many astrology practitioners believe), how you can track the general decline of literacy and critical thinking skills and the education system by using the proliferation of astrology as a proxy…
… I would find those topics interesting.
But generally speaking, in an irl, casual conversation scenario?
Yeah my rule of thumb is that if we are just recently met and you are ardently asking me what my sign is, you’re a person I would rather not know at all.
Nothing wrong with having a filter. I suppose mine is that I won’t be friends with anyone who insists on contact through social media apps instead of regular texting (maybe Signal if they’re cool)
I also have that same additional filter as well, haha.
Maybe… we could… be friends lol?
I am so very tired of trying to explain how awful social media apps are to everyone, how they don’t realize they’re addicted to a digital drug that makes them angry, depressed and misinformed…
And then you also try to explain how to actually do online security, and they usually get angry when you tell them that all the marketing and advertisments lied to them.
Probably lol. I’d wager most of us Lemmy dorks would get along with most of us Lemmy dorks IRL or otherwise
I suppose Lemmy is social media but its non-monetary, completely-volunteer-run nature really does make it feel like a different animal. At least I’m not horribly addicted like I used to be with Reddit, anyway
What if real life is a video game?
Then astrology would be the equivalent of an entire belief system that functionally is so complex it essentially contitutes a religion…
Astrology would be that, but built on urban legend, pre-internet era myths about older video games, like Mew being in the back of a truck in Vermillion city.
It would be fake cheat codes that don’t work.