The comments here are extremely unhelpful. We get it, you think astrology is stupid and anyone that thinks it works is an idiot worth ostracizing.
Now can we get on with comments actually diving deeper into the actual study in the OP?
Does Astrology Work?
51–60 of 188 posts
Re: Does Astrology Work?
#52My personal astrological projection is that none of the astrologers who criticised the original study, designed the new survey, or participated in the experiment will accept the validity of its results.
Their income depends on it!
It doesn't really, at least not to a great extent. Most people seeking advice from astrologers didn't start because of science nor will they stop because of science.
Re: Does Astrology Work?
#53Obviously astrology does no better than random guessing, that's no surprise. But the fact that astrology had such low levels of agreement is a little interesting to me -- I guess I assumed there was some kind of underlying system to astrology, but I guess not!
> Much to my surprise, astrologers had very low agreement with each other on the chart for each person. If astrologers picked charts at random, they would agree with each other 20% of the time. In our study, even the most experienced astrologers only agreed 28% of the time.
Re: Does Astrology Work?
#54I did a similar experiment with my sister a few years ago and got nearly identical results.
We'd gotten into a discussion about how neither of us believe the explanation that astrology gives for how it works (that the position of the planets at the time of your birth influence your personality) but my sister thought a person's star sign might be a proxy for being born in a particular season which could reasonably affect someone's personality (ex: perhaps babies born in the winter share personality traits distinct from babies born in the summer).
She also thought that given a list of people and descriptions of personality traits of star signs she could match them with better-than-chance accuracy.
We made a list of ~10 people that she knew personally. I looked up their star signs and found a description of all 12 signs from an authoritative-looking astrology site. For each of the 10 people I gave her a choice of their actual star sign and two randomly picked star signs (determined and shuffled by an RNG). Random guessing would predict she'd have a 1/3rd chance of getting any individual person correct. She predicted she'd get ~7/10 correct.
She got exactly 3/10.
Re: Does Astrology Work?
#55tl;dr No, it doesn't work - statistically it's identical to random guessing.
Is it equal to random guessing (which isn't fully random) or closer to true randomness? If the latter, can we use it as a PRNG? "Now powered by Astrology" branding, for markets where it would increase sales.
I don't think they examined true randomness, but they did look at inter-astrologer consistency, and that was also no better than chance, which strongly suggests their answers were uniformly distributed (rather than being wrong, but everyone being wrong in the same way).
Re: Does Astrology Work?
#56Obviously astrology does no better than random guessing, that's no surprise. But the fact that astrology had such low levels of agreement is a little interesting to me -- I guess I assumed there was some kind of underlying system to astrology, but I guess not! > Much to my surprise, astrologers had very low agreement with each other on the chart for each person. If astrologers picked charts at random, they would agre…
Obviously disease is caused by a dwarf residing in the belly.
Re: Does Astrology Work?
#57I’d be interested in the views of professional as well as hobby astrologers who are on HN.
Yes. My current girlfriend told me that her father forbade her to marry before a given age, because this was a recommandation of the astrologer who chose her current name. I met her at that current age.
Another prediction was done 6 years before, that said she will meet an exceptional man by 2024 but also that she will have to go back in her country on that year. Since we met this year and she considers me an exceptional man, she believes I'm the guy of the prophecy. However, because the first part of the prediction is true, she's quite stressed about the second part.
Based on those two data points, Taiwanese fortune tellers seems to be quite on point. I'll revise my judgement in the future based on if she had to go back or not (I'll follow her anyway).
Re: Does Astrology Work?
#58There's a famous study that found that hockey players are statistically more likely to be born in certain months, due to them being the biggest in their year-groups, which created a self-fulfilling cycles of attention from coaches. Reinterpreted, if you're an Aquarius, you're 50% more likely than an Aries to get into the NHL[1]. So, I guess I do sometimes believe in astrology, it's just very rarely better than random…
Arguably, birth date and astrology are only tangentially related. Iirc I looked into it and there was little empirical evidence for 12 groups, it is more like 4 groups spring/summer/fall/winter.
Re: Does Astrology Work?
#59Nothing new or surprising was learned, the skeptics say 'see!' the 'believers' will disregard. And it's fine.
Most people don't believe tarot cards are really some magical thing, it's just an interactive and creative way to get some random inspirational qoutes or text. It's either fitting and viewed a true, or not fitting and simply disregarded. I know it's all bs, but that doesn't mean it cannot be entertaining.
Re: Does Astrology Work?
#60There's a famous study that found that hockey players are statistically more likely to be born in certain months, due to them being the biggest in their year-groups, which created a self-fulfilling cycles of attention from coaches. Reinterpreted, if you're an Aquarius, you're 50% more likely than an Aries to get into the NHL[1]. So, I guess I do sometimes believe in astrology, it's just very rarely better than random…
I know you are being ironic, but for those that don't, this is completely unrelated to Astrology and more to how we break kids/teens in age categories (sorry, I don't know the proper terms for this in English). Which, by the way, may be different from country to country due to terms/calendars, etc.