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Young people are flocking to astrology

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Re: Young people are flocking to astrology

#781

Post by albrewer »

harimau777 wrote: post #575

I have a pet theory that things like astrology, tarot, the I Ching, Myers Briggs, etc. are valuable (and therefore stick around) not because they have a supernatural or scientific ability to make correct predictions, but because they provide a useful framework for discussing topics. So for example, even if tarot doesn't give you supernatural insight, the discussion it generates with the card reader may allow you to r…

Tangentially related to tarot, I wanted to get a deck of tarot playing cards to try out some variants of bridge and whist I'd read about and could not find anything that wasn't trying to lean into the spooky/occult side of tarot "readings".

As far as I can tell, nobody's making "casino style" tarot decks. But, maybe I'm searching for the wrong thing.

Re: Young people are flocking to astrology

#782

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

baremetal wrote: post #709
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so are the 6 days actually 6 thousand years?

I take it to mean the creation account is from God's perspective not ours. I don't have the slightest problem with modern science and it's reckoning of creation. The universe started with light in both accounts.

> The universe started with light in both accounts.

First light was estimated to be about 240,000 to 300,000 years after the big bang, so I would hesitate to say that the universe started with light [1]. You could determine that the first "day" started 300,000 years or so after the big bang, but then that throws off the other timings of creation. This demonstrates how the bible isn't even precise enough to be proven wrong as the "day" can seem to mean whatever people want it to mean.

> I take it to mean the creation account is from God's perspective not ours.

This sounds to me almost like a get-out clause as presumably God's perspective can be interpreted to be anything you want and cannot be proven false (similar to how an invisible pink unicorn's perspective can never be proven false).

[1] https://phys.org/news/2016-11-universe.html

Re: Young people are flocking to astrology

#783

Post by nostrademons »

jprete wrote: post #658
FishInTheWater wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the trick. It's about feelings of certainty, not actual measurable reproduceable predictions. Most long-lived divination methods are very vague. Anything providing concrete predictions is easily proven wrong and discredited, only the vague survives. But people rarely take ambiguous answers for what they are, and instead interpret them into something more certain. And this lets divination exploit all kinds of b…

Nitpick: The five-factor scale (extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) both reproduces and makes good life predictions. MBTI and most other personality tests unfortunately seem to be astrology for the scientifically oriented.

The correlation between MBTI and the Big-5 is surprisingly strong (except for neuroticism, which has no representation in the MBTI):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

I look at personality typologies in general as approximations. If you actually want to get to know a person, get to know them. But when you need to make a snap judgment about how someone might see the world and react to you, on very little information, it's handy to have a general archetype as guidelines. You can fill in all the details later.

It's not unlike Carmack's fast inverse square root, a Bloom filter, or how Google hasn't used PageRank since 2006 (instead substituting a cheaper-to-calculate approximation). Yes, they give wrong answers. But the answers are usually close enough that when you lack the computing power to get a better result, they'll do.

Re: Young people are flocking to astrology

#784

Post by zmgsabst »

badcppdev wrote: post #382
zmgsabst wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Wikipedia: > Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird Bird are in the dinosaur clade, ie the biological group defined by the dinosaur family. Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that humans are mammals.

I'm not going to argue with your clear reference but I will reference this article: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-rept... which adds a bit of useful context. "So a reptile is any animal descended from the original group called reptiles. Both birds and mammals share ancestors sometimes referred to as reptile-like animals (Reptiliomorpha), but it's not very common for people to talk about mamm…

That’s because mammals aren’t reptiles:

Mammals are from Synapsids[0] and dinosaurs (and modern reptiles) are from Sauropsida[1] — with the commonality being that amphibians split off first [2]. We can draw disjoint clades, which we cannot do for birds and dinosaurs. Beyond that, you’re just talking about tetrapods in general [3]. Reptiliomorpha has multiple names, precisely due to this — eg, pan-amniota.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropsida

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapod

Re: Young people are flocking to astrology

#785

Post by sibeliuss »

Rationalists will always dismiss anything that has a woo quotient ascribed to it. This is unfortunate because traditional astrology provides a remarkably sophisticated toolset to study this aspect of reality -- _but you have to know how to look at it_.

The system deals with archetypal reality. Archetypes have an unboundedness to them that live within a fixed topical frame. Astrology says: at such and such time, such an archetype is active; it is probable that this _type_ of event will occur, but it is impossible to say exactly what it will be. Using the more ancient toolset one can narrow down the type of event quite precisely.

An extremely simple example of this:

Astrologer says to client, "In two years your 5th house will be active and you will have a baby". Two years pass, and the client does not have a baby, but rather publishes a book they've been working on for a long time. As the 5th house covers children and other labors of love, this prediction is in fact accurate. The book is their baby, and it has been born. This mode is how one must look at all topics covering all of the 12 houses houses and signs, as augmented by all of the planets and their myriad significations. And crucially, this is how one must understand predictions made by skilled astrologers. It's a different gaze, but also one that is testable assuming the experiment is designed correctly.

Discussions about pop astrology (as seen in this article) will always fail to comprehend the true depth and potential of the craft.

Re: Young people are flocking to astrology

#786

Post by halkony »

honzabe wrote: post #649
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in various "alternative" industries in my youth. One day I was having an informal diner with people that, in another context, could have been business partners. One guy was making a killing with an astrology service by phone. He started with those text message based games, that were popular in the 2000'. Remember? "Send 'love' to this number to know if he loves you". And eventually created a full phone call…

>> "You have to see astrology as porn for women", he said. If that is the case, what is the pleasure they get out of it? Porn triggers the pleasure centers that sex triggers... but astrology, what does that trigger? Sense of security that you "know" your future after reading your horoscope? Or what? Did the guy have any theory about that?

It's worth noting that women experience sexuality differently. You can see it clearly in romance novels. Women don't read smut for the sex scenes, they read it for the sexual tension and character development. Male sexuality is image-based, female sexuality is language-based.

To say an astrology hotline is strictly equivalent to an orgasm is silly, but for women the circuitry is very nuanced so I wouldn't be surprised if the same neurons were firing.

Re: Young people are flocking to astrology

#788

Post by halkony »

piker wrote: post #226
arthur2e5 wrote: post #219

> Yet more Americans know their zodiac sign than their blood type, I mean, most people get a reminder of their birthday once per year, but blood type? You have to test for that and most people just don't see that sort of thing come up. The average person neither gets blood transfusions obviously (and it's not like medical professionals take what you state about your blood type for granted, so remembering doesn't help…

Also the naming convention isn't memorable at all compared to the Zodiac which even includes an emblem.

Plus it's easy to get a zodiac tattoo in case you forget. Maybe I should get my bloodtype tattooed...

Re: Young people are flocking to astrology

#789

Post by shagie »

gambiting wrote: post #582
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magicians can do what looks like turning water into wine easily. Is that seriously your biggest issue with religion? If there's anything to be really skeptical about its that a person resurrected from the dead, rest of the miracles are pretty mundane in modern standards. And the way I understand their epistemology, they know it happened because people saw him both dying and living afterwards, so it boils down to whet…

>> they know it happened because people saw him both dying and living afterwards, so it boils down to whether you believe their accounts. I come from a religious background, born and raised catholic, and even in our indoctrinating upbringing it was made clear that the new testament isn't eyewitness testimony. It's a written story of something someone said. Given the age of the material this is the best we're going to…

One of the books that I've come across that gets into the development process of the gospels is:

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

According to that book, there was a fair bit of religious conflict between the gonastic branch and the proto-orthordox (and some others too) with gospels and edits that attempt to discredit the other sects or build up their own narrative that is in agreement with their faith.

Re: Young people are flocking to astrology

#790

Post by aodonnell2536 »

joshstrange wrote: post #264

At this point I assume all articles saying “young people are doing X” to be total bollocks. Like the articles we’ve seen here about paper maps making a comeback for young people (a small handful of people were using them as art) or the “young people trading their smartphones for dumb phones” which had a tiny sample size and sounded like bullshit. Nowadays you find 1-2 tweets (or similar), call it a trend, and move on…

In general I would agree, but I would like to add I have had two conversations in the last month or so with strangers who were both women in their late 20s to early 30s that involved their asking of my zodiac sign, and a quick rundown of what that meant
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