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Does Astrology Work?

clearerthinking.org

1–10 of 188 posts

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#6
Astrology is just calendar. People born a certain time of the year have been exposed to similar conditions when developing, therefore have similar traits. Large scale epigenome analysis could quantify this, but there is no money in this research.

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#7
post #3

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Except that 3 actual studies about it, turned out to have a different result:

"A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".[12]

A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".[13]

In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine."

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#8

Astrology is just calendar. People born a certain time of the year have been exposed to similar conditions when developing, therefore have similar traits. Large scale epigenome analysis could quantify this, but there is no money in this research.

I think that's working on a lot of assumptions. The null hypothesis would be that there are no trait differences between people born at different times of the year and that would need to be disproven.

However it would be interesting to see if there are real manifestations of trait change from the bias of believing this.

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#9
post #5
post #4

It works as an entertainment/grift industry.

It also gives some people a sense of safety (by the illusion of being able to make sense of events).

Yes - something which many people are desperate for. And astrology, generally, is far less harmful than most of the alternatives.

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#10

Astrology is just calendar. People born a certain time of the year have been exposed to similar conditions when developing, therefore have similar traits. Large scale epigenome analysis could quantify this, but there is no money in this research.

That is such a Capricorn thing to say.
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