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.
> Most people don't believe tarot cards are really some magical thing 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.
I am one of those people that have trouble with this idea.
Can you elaborate the ways that it is useful for some people?
The best I can steelman is the general idea that human minds have a "religion-shaped hole" in our understanding of our environment, and astrology fills that hole in a mostly-harmless way. I don't love this perspective, though, and I'm wondering if you have something else in mind.
I flip a coin during periods of indecisiveness and have built a silly lore around a God named Gamblor (yes, from the Simpsons) that punishes people that ask him to choose their fate through a coin toss and then don't follow through on his decree. As long as I am reasonable in what decisions I give to the altar of Gamblor, I find belief in him a net good for my life even though I realize no study would prove he has ac…
Careful here, Gamblor is a coyote spirit. It is as happy to jump you off a cliff as to have you choose the salad instead of the country fried steak.
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…
The low agreement may be accounted for by the degree to which each astrologer adjusts for changes in planetary alignments (or whatever) since astrology was first established as a discipline. In other words, birth month for a particular astrological sign is different now than it would have been 2000 years ago.
Modern Astrology was established by Ptolemy who standardized on the Tropical Zodiac in the 2nd Century AD. In that system, the Sun always moves from Pisces to Aires on the Vernal Equinox. This was a more precise definition of what the ancient Babylonians did (defining the Zodiac based on 30 degree divisions of the Ecliptic).
I'm not arguing that Astrology is scientific, but I am saying it's precise, to the limits of the measurement technology of the time period in which it was defined.
In the mid-to-late 1800s, many prominent astronomers were pretty sure there was another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, because Mercury's orbit has a peculiar irregularity. They called this yet-to-be-properly-seen planet 'Vulcan', and it became a fixture in astrologers' horoscopes. In the early 20th century, Einstein came along with his Theory of General Relativity, and with these equations he demonstrated that t…
The story of Vulcan's hypothesized existence, and disproof by Einstein, was the title essay in a collection by Isaac Asimov, The Planet that Wasn't (1976):
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?
The more effective mechanism for steering the conversation is to make the top-level comment you'd prefer to see.
You might also email mods about off-topic or HN-guidelines-violating comments at hn@ycombinator.com. Dang's adopted a practice of sweeping off-topicness into a buried thread which is quite effective.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > 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.…
I'd make a distinction.
The concept being studied is bunk.
The methodology to show it's bunk is ... intellectually gratifying, IMO. Specifically, how does one "prove a negative", at least to the sense of prediction no better than random?
"Does astrology work?" depends a bit on what you mean by "work". In terms of predicting the future, no. But probably most people do it to feel better about their lives. It may work from that point of view. You could compare it to finding a religion or seeing a shrink.
There's a further means by which random selection methods can be useful (and the fact that the computing device you're reading this on all but certainly has a robust random-sequence generating capability speaks to this): random decisionmaking can avoid biases of rational or deterministic methods. There's a great essay discussing this posted a decade ago in Aeon, "How to choose? If you can’t choose wisely, choose randomly":
Of course, if this is the true function of astrology, then random predictions would be working as designed. Though that's not what most people, astrology practitioners included, who take astrology seriously seem to believe.
> Most people don't believe tarot cards are really some magical thing 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.
I am one of those people that have trouble with this idea. Can you elaborate the ways that it is useful for some people? The best I can steelman is the general idea that human minds have a "religion-shaped hole" in our understanding of our environment, and astrology fills that hole in a mostly-harmless way. I don't love this perspective, though, and I'm wondering if you have something else in mind.
Well, putting aside for now whether it is religion-shaped, let's assume that there is a hole and that filling the hole is like writing an essay. When I'm writing an essay. I can stare at the blank screen and start writing, or I can generate a draft essay with ChatGPT and start from there. For me I've found ChatGPT is a better starting point. It is kind of the same thing with astrology - let's say the prompt is defining your personality when you're making a dating profile. You might start from scratch, but a lot of people don't know their personality. Whereas, you start from an astrological sign, you can say "I'm a Capricorn but feisty" or whatever. Now obviously based on this study and the previous, the signs are meaningless. But the personality descriptions people build around them are not - even if you think Capricorn or whatever is meaningless, you can ask someone who says they're such a sign what they think the traits of a Capricorn are, and they will most likely be giving you true descriptions of themselves. There is actually a known effect in psychology where if you ask someone (A) to fill out a personality quiz as though they were a friend (B) filling out the survey while they (B) answer as though they were the person (A), sort of a double-remove perspective thing, then the answers more accurately reflect one's true personality and perceptions. I wonder if perhaps astrology fills a similar role here of allowing one to look at oneself from the outside.