71–80 of 188 posts
To be fair though, most doctors don't perform much better than these astrologers in my experience, and that's with billions of dollars in research, a quarter of a million dollar education and years of rigorous training. It turns out most people are incompetent and our science is worse than we think in a lot of cases.
"Astrology is the mother of science" is a great quote and more or less historically accurate too. We should not be ashamed of the origins of science being in astrology and alchemy, they were important steps on the way.
Nothing 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.
Obviously 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…
There'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.
So if you set a cut off point at September, for example, kids born just after September: October, November, December, will be the biggest ones.
For example for an age group covering up to 11 years old in September 2024, the kids that are 10 years and 9/10/11 months old (so born in October, November, December 2013) will statistically be the best players of their group.
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?
Nothing 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.
I don't even recall which card it was, but it inspired careful examination of the archetype and how it fits with my life and decision-masking, lasting several days.
Perhaps that's all magic really is.
Nothing 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.
And if it is like placebo effect, it may actually work at some scale and may influence your choices. So, in that way it is real.
Nothing 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.
I think a lot of people have trouble with the idea that despite astrology not being accurate or grounded in science, it can still be useful for some of the people some of the time.
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?
It's not exactly a HN topic is it?
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I think this would fall under "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", even though most of us think it's bunk.