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Does Astrology Work?

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Re: Does Astrology Work?

#91

Post by andrewla »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #71

Astrology works on people who really believe in astrology, because they internally reinforce behavior patterns to conform to their astrological predications. 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 a…

> Astrology works

Citation needed. Even agreement between the astrologers was low, which is a strong argument that it doesn't work even if you believe in it. That is, the patterns "predicted" by astrology simply do not exist; individuals cannot reliably reinforce their behavior based on expected behavior because there is no agreement on what the expected behavior is.

> most doctors don't perform much better than these astrologers in my experience

I mean, we've all had bad experiences with doctors, but this is comparing apples to wooden spheres painted red. I have had doctors successfully treat patients many times, including such things as prescribing antibiotics and succesfully delivering children.

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#92

Post by ziddoap »

woleium wrote: post #74
i80and wrote: post #53

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…

Kary Mullis (nobel laureate for discovering PCR, allowing DNA sequencing) disagrees in his book “dancing naked in the mindfield” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

Maybe it is just too early in the morning for me, but Kary Mullis disagrees with what in particular? That astrologers disagree with each other? That astrology does no better than random guessing?

The wiki link has a single line, saying that he believed in astrology, but that's it. I'm struggling to see what point you intended with your comment.

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#93

Post by lesuorac »

mihaic wrote: post #49

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…

Well, I don't think that table is sufficient to show your point.

Trivially if more individuals were born in Feb/Jan then you should expect more players to be born then. This is not the case, Feb/Jan are the 12th lowest and 10 lowest birth months (for 2023 [1]; I suspect things stay fairly in line across years).

So, while comparing apples-to-oranges, if you divide the number of players by live births you see it start at 0.3% in Jan and pretty linearly drop down to 0.18% in December.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/provisional-tables.htm

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#94

Post by WaffleIronMaker »

voidUpdate wrote: post #33
SkyBelow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can we use spiritual randomness to power our AI products, to maximise marketing crap?

Kinda? It makes me think of Randonautica:

> Randonautica (a portmanteau of "random" + "nautica") is an app launched on February 22, 2020 founded by Auburn Salcedo and Joshua Lengfelder. It randomly generates coordinates that enable the user to explore their local area and report on their findings. According to its creators, the app is "an attractor of strange things," letting one choose specific coordinates based on a certain theme. It gained controversy after a report of two teenagers coincidentally finding a corpse while using the app.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randonautica

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#95

Post by freitzkriesler2 »

I'll admit, I have a fascination with Greco Roman antiquities and Hellenic /Roman astrology is one of them. To be able to enjoy the literature and culture of the era and the archetypes expressed, understanding how this all works helps a great deal.

As such, I know a fair amount of astrology from a Greco Roman perspective and by extension all the way up to medieval astrology. Yeah plz I find it fascinating.

With that said, the vast majority of western astrology is done using new age psychological nonsense that was literally made up by hippies during the 60s. It is completely divorced from the tradition that was developed and refined from the Chaldeans (aka Babylonians), Greeks, Arabs, and Europeans and as such doesn't make any sense against the system that was developed and refined over at least a thousand years.

A good astrologer won't say with precision that X is going to happen (like you will meet the love of your life or pass the test), they'll give their predictions in archetypes and give a range of outcomes that fall under those archetypes.

Take for example the meaning of the 9th house, the 9th house represents far away travel, religion, higher education, and publishing. These are all desperate subjects from one another and need to be considered in a predictoon against the backdrop of your life.

Does it work? It's a bit like the weather, I can say this range of things under this archetype will happen on X date at X time. That's pretty much it.

If you're interested in the subject, the best primer book I can recommend is the study office and fortune by Chris Brennan which can be found on Amazon in print and ebook format. It's written as a college level text with citations and will give you the historical background and practical foundations to understand the classical philosophy that underpins the basis of the tradition.

Anywho, I expect a good roasting and some down d00ts for my interest in t is subject.

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#96

Post by cwmma »

woleium wrote: post #74
i80and wrote: post #53

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…

Kary Mullis (nobel laureate for discovering PCR, allowing DNA sequencing) disagrees in his book “dancing naked in the mindfield” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

He's a great example of why being an expert in a specific thing does not make you an expert in all things.

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#97

Post by herculity275 »

woleium wrote: post #74
i80and wrote: post #53

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…

Kary Mullis (nobel laureate for discovering PCR, allowing DNA sequencing) disagrees in his book “dancing naked in the mindfield” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

Kind of you to link the Wiki page as the full sentence that mentions Mullis' astrology belief is: "Mullis professed a belief in astrology and wrote about an encounter with a fluorescent, talking raccoon that he suggested might have been an extraterrestrial alien."

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#98

Post by writeslowly »

mihaic wrote: post #49

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…

This study tested sun-sign (which is basically birth month I think) against personality tests for predicting life outcomes and found that sun sign did very poorly compared to the personality tests. I'd have thought there would be a small chance of birth month predicting some things, and then adding in other astrological facts (the position of Jupiter or whatever) would make things worse, but both methods appear to be equally bad.

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#99

Post by soco »

williamdclt wrote: post #89
CuriouslyC wrote: post #71

Astrology works on people who really believe in astrology, because they internally reinforce behavior patterns to conform to their astrological predications. 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 a…

Perform better _at what_? I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap between what doctors and astrologers are trying to do

Works at generating income for the astrologers, of course.

Re: Does Astrology Work?

#100

Post by jonwiseman »

So, yeah, but an interesting chunk of results: is the inter-rater agreement ACTUALLY random?

(Not sure if this is formatted correctly, feel free to comment if you'd do these stats differently)

    from scipy.stats import binomtest
    # stats: {experience_level: (rate, num_in_group)}
    stats = {
        "lvl1": (20.5, 156),
        "lvl2": (22.2, 66),
        "lvl3": (23.3, 50),
        "lvl4": (21.2, 39),
        "lvl5": (20.8, 12),
        "lvl6": (28.3, 5),
    }
    
    for lvl, (rate, num) in stats.items():
        num_tests = num * (num - 1)
    
        res = binomtest(int(rate * num_tests * 0.01), num_tests, 0.2, alternative="greater")
    
        # with multiple comparison correction with bonferroni
        print(f"{lvl}: p-value = {res.pvalue:.4f} {'*' if res.pvalue
So maybe there's an internal consistency in how these people are trained, and maybe it's not completely dependent on skill level. This is assuming I read the https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/can-astrologers-use-ast... part correctly.
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