Except that 3 actual studies about it, turned out to have a different result:
"A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".[12]
A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".[13]
In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine."
I've updated Wikipedia, on a different subject, where I was personally involved in something that was being described completely incorrectly and with significant misconclusion, with no sourcing. It was reverted within minutes. Twice.
Not sure about that. If people are convinced they are not getting along with another person because they are "lion" and then never do a real analysis of their communication failures, then I see a lot of harm for all the people around them, usually children.
If someone, even the ones who believe in astrology, believe it works that way, that's a problem with the person, not with astrology. Astrology doesn't state that x and y alone don't go well together. It points the struggles and harmonies between two sets of highly complex birth charts. Disclaimer: I don't believe in astrology, but I know a little about its ground rules.
Astrology is just calendar. People born a certain time of the year have been exposed to similar conditions when developing, therefore have similar traits. Large scale epigenome analysis could quantify this, but there is no money in this research.
I think that's working on a lot of assumptions. The null hypothesis would be that there are no trait differences between people born at different times of the year and that would need to be disproven.
However it would be interesting to see if there are real manifestations of trait change from the bias of believing this.
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.
> 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.
I don't think they have enough data to tell, but that seems like a logical next step - determine just how random it is and perform all of the statistical tests of randomness.
Damn, you beat me to it. I was already picturing something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand but with astrologers in cages instead of lava lamps.
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).
My 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.
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.
A relevant historical fact here is that the reason the snake oil salesman is a fraud isn't because snake oil is ineffective, but that what he's selling isn't snake oil.
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).
>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.
They said “by 2024”, not “in 2024”. A young adult woman in her prime meeting a good guy sometime in 6 years is not exactly a pinpoint prediction. Also, I assume a lot of her family still lives in Taiwan. I would think that having someone you are serious with meet your family would be a common and expected thing. So again, this doesn’t seem like as much a pinpoint prediction than just a reasonable assumption.
“In the next 6 years, you’ll probably meet a guy you like and probably take him back to Taiwan to meet your family”
I keep up with astrology personally since I do find that my beliefs, practices, and actions line up fairly closely with my sign (Cancer). But, I know it's basically just a bunch of hand waving and guesses.
I use it more as a tool to ask myself questions, or thinking of things from a new point of view. For example, my horoscope today says "Practice expressing yourself without seeking affirmation." And, yeah, that should be something I work on, my feelings don't need to be validated to be true.
I studied astrology independently for 3-4 years and concluded that while it can lead to astonishingly accurate predictions at times, the current literature is far from reliable or accurate. It needs to be studied scientifically to gain credibility. Currently, conclusions are often drawn from small sample sizes (sometimes just 1-2 charts), and it’s presented more as an art than a science.
I was drawn to astrology because, in India, it’s deeply embedded in the culture. Personal predictions and predictions about my family members that came true piqued my interest. For example, an astrologer told my father when I was in 10th grade that I would never complete my graduation, which was revealed to me only after I dropped out of college. Despite being a top student with scholarships, this prediction came true, sparking my curiosity.
There are many similar stories, particularly related to Agastya Nadi Jyotish. For instance, in my Agastya Nadi prediction, 10-12 sentences described my wife. Individually, each sentence was generic, like "she will be a middle child" or "she will not be tall," but the probability of all being correct is quite low. Except for one detail (she was predicted to have a master’s degree, but she only has a bachelor’s), all were accurate. Such experiences can lead one to believe in astrology.
However, I’ve also noticed that people who believe in astrology tend to remember the accurate predictions and forget or dismiss the inaccurate ones. For example, many people for whom I’ve done chart readings (as a hobbyist, for free) often recall the predictions that came true when they meet me after many years.
I remember when this researcher was trying to recruit participants for this study off of social media, which was widely met with skepticism in the serious astrological community.
It is nearly impossible to find truly skilled astrologers who would agree to participate in a study like this off of Twitter, those who have studied the decade(s) or more required to be proficient. Real Astrology requires an uncommon mix of character; one must be both scholarly and intuitive, while also recognizing the symbolic nature of things. These qualities, in the proper balance to succeed at the craft, are rare.
Further, only astrologers who study traditional techniques can yield accurate results, and these "accurate results" are archetypal in nature [1]. Modern astrology is a free-for-all with a very high woo quotient, and mostly caters to the young.
(My personal take is that Astrology is a divinatory, participatory "science", and can't be statistically analyzed [2], though the Gauquelins did just this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect)
[1]: By archetypal I mean: astrologer sees Jupiter transiting the 5th house and predicts a child born in the coming year; no human child is born, but given the general signification of the 5th ("children"), the native did publish a book, which they labored over, and loved. Statistically it was a miss, though archetypally it was a hit; this must be understood by all in order for it to be meaningfully true. [2] This is where the impossibility of accurate statistical analysis lives.
Can we pinpoint a specific decade this happened or is it a slow process? Because if we count CS as a science, I’m seeing it become just like the worst of the sciences in this regard. AI has really gotten me pessimistic. There’s so much borrowing from other subjects since there are now models for every subject and every grade level, which ultimately will become products for large corporations. Like maybe we should hire at least one full time linguist, mathematician, chemist, logician, etc to sit high in the chain behind each of the respective models. I’m seeing a lot of faux rigor because it’s moving lightning speed.
I've only had an inside view of academia since the mid aughts, but it was already a well established issue then with departments trying to institute p-hacking controls and citation rings being a known thing. I think a big part of why it's exploding so hard is the scarcity of academic jobs combined with the big push to increase STEM PhD production leaving people to a cutthroat competition, where you have to either cheat or be absolutely brilliant to have a real shot at a tenured position.
Sociology, psychology, biology, political science, economics oh man does the list go on... If you spend time supporting scientists in doing statistics and research methodology for any amount of time you will see the emperor has absolutely no clothes.
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.
I think it was a joke. The statistical factor is actually age: the older kids perform better because they're more grown up (physically bigger, mentally more developed).
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.
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.
Is that astrology or just the time of year? I.e., is the cause the position of a planet projected onto the plane perpendicular to your position at birth or some process with a strong 1/year frequency component?
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.
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.
The USAH ADM coach training now addresses this directly. They require all youth hockey coaches to take self-paced and live workshop training, and require annual continuing education.
One example here that explains the thought process:
"Birthday bias: Understanding relative age effect in youth hockey"
I had a thought that astrology may have had some merits in older societies in climates where weather and daylight patters have distinct variations throughout the year (i.e tropical excluded zones), with effect on agriculture and daily activities, and so how and what small child were exposed in specific several months of their life (diet, activity, temperatures, daylight, ...) have had noticable effect on their behaviour and growth. I.e. if mothers' breastmilk composition varies based on the availability of fresh and nutritious food, or if nutritious food was available at the time of weining, or at their growth spurts, how much outside activity they had after learning to walk or run, what they seen mostly while learning to see, and so on, so the variations in the weeks and months when specific bodily and neurological development occur, that may have been noticable. Winter childs are so, spring childs are different so, and so on. Modern societies equal these yearly variations a lot, even if astrology hocuspocus had some foundation due to such underlying real resons, it likely disappeared in past several decades.
Yeah, I wrote my post as a joke, but I think that before modern medicine it would have been measurably better to be born in the autumn, so that your mother would have fresh produce in the most important months of fetal development.
This is the thing. Astrology can more accurately be described as _earthstrology_. The qualities are reflected from the fixed perspective of the equinox and solstices, per the northern hemisphere. There's no relationship to the constellations as is commonly understood; it's planetary positions interfacing with the seasons, and the symbols generated from such.
"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.
I'm afraid that several modern social "sciences" are not distinguished from astrology or alchemy by their epistemic rigor. Shame seems appropriate there.
Yes but sort of what I was getting at is that individual astrologers and alchemists accomplished impressive, and usefully true, feats despite the faultiness of their tools. And their tools were eventually refined into our tools, which are much more reliable though of course still not perfect.
So who knows what we can get out of those easily disparaged modern sciences, or where they may eventually lead us. If those early pioneers had this view of their methods, had felt this sense of shame around them, where would we be?
> 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. 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.
That seems like an ironically anti-scientific stance to take, not to mention a slippery slope to start moderating what people find interesting would introduce some serious bias.
Moderators would gave an extremely difficult task trying to sift through (a) what most of think is hunk and (b) the cases where most of us are actually wrong.
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?
I'm impressed, as other commenters have noted, by the specific way that astrology fails, rather than just by the fact of it's failure.
The inter-astrologer agreement being low strongly indicates that there's not even a systematic basis for how conclusions are reached. I would have expected more bland agreement -- this person does X, which is something that Leos do, so they are a Leo. And they're just fooled by confirmation bias and base rate fallacies. "Yes they are a Leo!" -> I'm a genius, "No, they're a Taurus" -> Oh, it is so unusual to see a Taurus act that way!
But this failure feels deeper; people have adapted to the fact that astrology doesn't work by adding ever more complex epicycles to their personal theory of astrology until it has completely diverged from their peers.
Relates to that, I've always been interested in the comparison of astrology to the various different personality tests.
I always find myself coming across a new (to me) personality test with a heavy dose of skepticism. More often than not I get to the results and am surprised with how well the results seem to describe me in great detail. I never know whether to shake my skepticism or if I just got taken by a way more clever slight of hand than astrology offers.
Astrology feels like a show from the early 00s that I can't remember the name of. It was setup as a live audience show with the host claiming to talk to dead people. The problem was he was so insanely generic that it was just basic statistics combined with basic skills at reading people's responses. He's often point to half the room of a few hundred people and say "I'm feeling someone...the letter S? ..."
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.
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 agree with each other 20% of the time. In our study, even the most experienced astrologers only agreed 28% of the time.
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.
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."
This is the kind of statement that the Appeal to Authority fallacy was made for. Just because someone is an expert in one field doesn't mean their opinions matter in every field.
All this points to is the danger of believing someone based on reputation rather than evidence.
Empirical evidence is the basis of science, not reputation. No one, no matter what they've done before, gets to present their hypotheses as fact without evidence.
One problem that outsiders to a field have is that we may lack the background knowledge to evaluate the evidence for a hypothesis. In that case, I try to rely on consensus rather than one expert opinion.
> Obviously astrology does no better than random guessing
Not necessarily. It is entirely plausible that babies born during the Summer months share something in common, and babies born during Winter months share something else. Since astrological signs are 100% correlated with the seasons, one could "guess" with a higher probability than random chance these traits. The causality would obviously not be from stars to babies, but from seasons to babies, but an observational study could end up "proving" that astrology works by identifying these "predictions".
This study was a followup to one that just used signs [1], which yielded performance no better than chance. If the summer/winter correlation held, then that study would have shown positive results, which it did not.
There's nothing to say that these star charts or seasons of birth cannot correlate with personality traits or life outcomes. But Astrology, as a practice, is not useful for unwinding those correlations. If you have some alternate system, feel free to propose it -- pump the star charts and personality charts from this study into some AI and see if it can come up with some kind of super-astrology, and then try to replicate it.
I doubt you'd find anything stronger than predicting the answer to the question "were you born in the summer or the winter".
Also, summer in one half of the world is winter in the other, so the signs do not correlate 100% with seasons, and you'd have to study across geographies.
> It is entirely plausible that babies born during the Summer months share something in common, and babies born during Winter months share something else.
This would not account for reversal of the seasons in opposite hemispheres...
... or do the northern and southern hemispheres practice a different "western" astrology (!).
Or ever more local differences like when school age cut off is. I would expect some small differences be found due to these impacts, but they would not be universally applicable without generalization.
If schools roll over to the next grade at the start of October, babies born in October will perform better due to being the oldest in their class, but this would not be universal. What I would expect to be universal, is given a school system that does grade division in this way, students right after the division would do better than the ones born right before, as the first group is the oldest in their class and the second group is the youngest.
The extent this pairs with astrology would probably depend purely on population densities between different cultures. If things were fully uniform it would average out, but given they aren't, some residual bias existing wouldn't surprise me.
But whether astrology actually settled on these features would depend on the feedback systems in place, and the granularity of those systems/how predictions were made in reference to a specific person.
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.
It is my understanding that ancient astrology was basically proto-astronomy, similar to how alchemy was the forerunner of chemistry/advanced metallurgy. A lot of woo, but the ‘art’ still had enough systematized concepts and early discoveries that it offered some limited scientific scaffolding.
The sophisticated system I'm speaking of however is not the astronomical science (though indeed they were responsible for this development, and it was of course sophisticated) but rather a methodical, extensive, rules-based study of fate, as related to platonic (archetypal) forms.
It depends on which "modern" astrology you have in mind. For example the "Shamanic Astrology" system by Daniel Giamario is the product of a lot of thought, effort, and research.
There are several different astrology systems in use that draw on various world spiritual/astrological traditions, make different astronomical assumptions and adjustments, etc.
There are also lots of different things that could factor into a birth chart reading, so different astrologers might put more emphasis on different aspects.
Fun stuff, and not entirely valueless as an exercise in self-reflection.
I 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.
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.
The most insightful tarot draw I've had (out of maybe five in my life) was one where I forgot to shuffle a brand new pack of cards, so I got four of the same.
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.
> 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.
> despite astrology not being accurate or grounded in science, it can still be useful for some of the people some of the time.
That's what an art form does.
The problem with astrology is that it's framed as a science giving answers to questions, not as an artistic performance giving insight into life patterns. It as painful as seeing people watch wrestling believing it is a real competitive sport.
Astrologers can definitely cross the line from being performers to being fraudsters. I wouldn't compare it with wrestling though.
Nobody above the age of 12 really believes wrestling is an unscripted sport. It's just kayfabe.
Did The Undertaker really bury people alive? He absolutely did. Did Mark Calaway (the wrestler's actual name) bury people alive? Of course not. Nobody called 911 to report a murder after watching The Undertaker perform.
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.
I don’t believe in astrology , tarot or anything of the sort one bit, but I still appreciate that it’s useful in the same way that an inspiring movie is useful. It presents a facet of human experience, which you can reflect upon. It invites you to think about things like “what is currently changing in my life, do I want challenge or stability, etc etc”. Maybe it doesn’t surface anything, maybe it tickles something you hadn’t realised until then.
In a way, I think it can lead to more profound realisations than if you just believe it “just” predicts the future
It doesn't predict the future, but it has totally a use for select-reflection. The same as if you ask ChatGPT "ask me a random question", and then you iterate your thoughts on top of this question.
Here, the randomness is provided by cards, and that's pretty much it.
There are some ill efects in coining busslshit stories to matters, especially when it becomes a dogma and is expected to be believed. Basically a lie, at least to the self, distorting understanding and collaborations with others on real (non-imaginery) matters.
If it remains on the entertainment level that is absolutely all right, I like that, enjoy that actually! Good play or relaxation for the brain.
> 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
I think most people believe tarot cards are not a magical thing and they also don't think it's an interactive and creative way to get some random inspirational quotes or text.
The number of people who practice tarot for entertainment of any kind is vanishingly small; and of that population, I'm not convinced that there are fewer true believers than for-fun-only folks.
So frame astrology type things as a randomization tool, that allows you to randomly navigate a set of questions and assessments to see how you're doing and feeling.
Remember when we learned about how bone divination helped hunter gathers search random areas and not be stuck with the bias of hunting where you previously hunted too much?
Kind of related. But, anyway, what I'm trying to say. I also feel like it's a snake oil scam and impossibly hard to avoid dishonesty at a random sample of astrologists.
My random card reader really flipped my head around when they promised me my reading without knowing my question or answers. They asked me how I felt about my questions and some considerations I could take about the answer and outcome, based on my cards. They said it was a process to navigate your thoughts, not for future telling. And I was impressed enough at this reframing to want to try and convince a few other HN nerds to consider this point as well. Be upset about the scammers but don't miss the possibility there can be a nugget of value and process outside of what you're expecting. There tend to be reasons why people continue doing things across cultures and time (there's something they get value out of in it, usually)
Astrology is one of those techniques where the uninitiated ran away with the metaphors and turned it into a big LARP. Give it a thousand years and much of our science will look much the same.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
"A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".[12]
A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".[13]
In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine."
That would be a great headline.
However it would be interesting to see if there are real manifestations of trait change from the bias of believing this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
https://programs.clearerthinking.org/astrology_challenge.htm...
> 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
And we see both in the study. The charts can't predict anyone and the claim of even having a consistent system falls apart.
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).
They said “by 2024”, not “in 2024”. A young adult woman in her prime meeting a good guy sometime in 6 years is not exactly a pinpoint prediction. Also, I assume a lot of her family still lives in Taiwan. I would think that having someone you are serious with meet your family would be a common and expected thing. So again, this doesn’t seem like as much a pinpoint prediction than just a reasonable assumption.
“In the next 6 years, you’ll probably meet a guy you like and probably take him back to Taiwan to meet your family”
I use it more as a tool to ask myself questions, or thinking of things from a new point of view. For example, my horoscope today says "Practice expressing yourself without seeking affirmation." And, yeah, that should be something I work on, my feelings don't need to be validated to be true.
I was drawn to astrology because, in India, it’s deeply embedded in the culture. Personal predictions and predictions about my family members that came true piqued my interest. For example, an astrologer told my father when I was in 10th grade that I would never complete my graduation, which was revealed to me only after I dropped out of college. Despite being a top student with scholarships, this prediction came true, sparking my curiosity.
There are many similar stories, particularly related to Agastya Nadi Jyotish. For instance, in my Agastya Nadi prediction, 10-12 sentences described my wife. Individually, each sentence was generic, like "she will be a middle child" or "she will not be tall," but the probability of all being correct is quite low. Except for one detail (she was predicted to have a master’s degree, but she only has a bachelor’s), all were accurate. Such experiences can lead one to believe in astrology.
However, I’ve also noticed that people who believe in astrology tend to remember the accurate predictions and forget or dismiss the inaccurate ones. For example, many people for whom I’ve done chart readings (as a hobbyist, for free) often recall the predictions that came true when they meet me after many years.
I remember when this researcher was trying to recruit participants for this study off of social media, which was widely met with skepticism in the serious astrological community.
It is nearly impossible to find truly skilled astrologers who would agree to participate in a study like this off of Twitter, those who have studied the decade(s) or more required to be proficient. Real Astrology requires an uncommon mix of character; one must be both scholarly and intuitive, while also recognizing the symbolic nature of things. These qualities, in the proper balance to succeed at the craft, are rare.
Further, only astrologers who study traditional techniques can yield accurate results, and these "accurate results" are archetypal in nature [1]. Modern astrology is a free-for-all with a very high woo quotient, and mostly caters to the young.
(My personal take is that Astrology is a divinatory, participatory "science", and can't be statistically analyzed [2], though the Gauquelins did just this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect)
[1]: By archetypal I mean: astrologer sees Jupiter transiting the 5th house and predicts a child born in the coming year; no human child is born, but given the general signification of the 5th ("children"), the native did publish a book, which they labored over, and loved. Statistically it was a miss, though archetypally it was a hit; this must be understood by all in order for it to be meaningfully true. [2] This is where the impossibility of accurate statistical analysis lives.
Glad we have something to point to finally as a reference
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.
[1] https://www.quanthockey.com/nhl/birth-month-totals/nhl-playe...
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.
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
One example here that explains the thought process:
"Birthday bias: Understanding relative age effect in youth hockey"
https://www.admkids.com/news_article/show/823923
So who knows what we can get out of those easily disparaged modern sciences, or where they may eventually lead us. If those early pioneers had this view of their methods, had felt this sense of shame around them, where would we be?
Now can we get on with comments actually diving deeper into the actual study in the OP?
> 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.
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity even though most of us think it's bunk."
That will avoid a lot of problems!
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?
The inter-astrologer agreement being low strongly indicates that there's not even a systematic basis for how conclusions are reached. I would have expected more bland agreement -- this person does X, which is something that Leos do, so they are a Leo. And they're just fooled by confirmation bias and base rate fallacies. "Yes they are a Leo!" -> I'm a genius, "No, they're a Taurus" -> Oh, it is so unusual to see a Taurus act that way!
But this failure feels deeper; people have adapted to the fact that astrology doesn't work by adding ever more complex epicycles to their personal theory of astrology until it has completely diverged from their peers.
I always find myself coming across a new (to me) personality test with a heavy dose of skepticism. More often than not I get to the results and am surprised with how well the results seem to describe me in great detail. I never know whether to shake my skepticism or if I just got taken by a way more clever slight of hand than astrology offers.
Astrology feels like a show from the early 00s that I can't remember the name of. It was setup as a live audience show with the host claiming to talk to dead people. The problem was he was so insanely generic that it was just basic statistics combined with basic skills at reading people's responses. He's often point to half the room of a few hundred people and say "I'm feeling someone...the letter S? ..."
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.
> 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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
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.
Empirical evidence is the basis of science, not reputation. No one, no matter what they've done before, gets to present their hypotheses as fact without evidence.
One problem that outsiders to a field have is that we may lack the background knowledge to evaluate the evidence for a hypothesis. In that case, I try to rely on consensus rather than one expert opinion.
Not necessarily. It is entirely plausible that babies born during the Summer months share something in common, and babies born during Winter months share something else. Since astrological signs are 100% correlated with the seasons, one could "guess" with a higher probability than random chance these traits. The causality would obviously not be from stars to babies, but from seasons to babies, but an observational study could end up "proving" that astrology works by identifying these "predictions".
There's nothing to say that these star charts or seasons of birth cannot correlate with personality traits or life outcomes. But Astrology, as a practice, is not useful for unwinding those correlations. If you have some alternate system, feel free to propose it -- pump the star charts and personality charts from this study into some AI and see if it can come up with some kind of super-astrology, and then try to replicate it.
I doubt you'd find anything stronger than predicting the answer to the question "were you born in the summer or the winter".
[1] https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/we-tested-the-predictiv...
This would not account for reversal of the seasons in opposite hemispheres...
... or do the northern and southern hemispheres practice a different "western" astrology (!).
If schools roll over to the next grade at the start of October, babies born in October will perform better due to being the oldest in their class, but this would not be universal. What I would expect to be universal, is given a school system that does grade division in this way, students right after the division would do better than the ones born right before, as the first group is the oldest in their class and the second group is the youngest.
The extent this pairs with astrology would probably depend purely on population densities between different cultures. If things were fully uniform it would average out, but given they aren't, some residual bias existing wouldn't surprise me.
But whether astrology actually settled on these features would depend on the feedback systems in place, and the granularity of those systems/how predictions were made in reference to a specific person.
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.
The sophisticated system I'm speaking of however is not the astronomical science (though indeed they were responsible for this development, and it was of course sophisticated) but rather a methodical, extensive, rules-based study of fate, as related to platonic (archetypal) forms.
There are also lots of different things that could factor into a birth chart reading, so different astrologers might put more emphasis on different aspects.
Fun stuff, and not entirely valueless as an exercise in self-reflection.
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.
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.
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.
That's what an art form does.
The problem with astrology is that it's framed as a science giving answers to questions, not as an artistic performance giving insight into life patterns. It as painful as seeing people watch wrestling believing it is a real competitive sport.
Nobody above the age of 12 really believes wrestling is an unscripted sport. It's just kayfabe.
Did The Undertaker really bury people alive? He absolutely did. Did Mark Calaway (the wrestler's actual name) bury people alive? Of course not. Nobody called 911 to report a murder after watching The Undertaker perform.
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.
In a way, I think it can lead to more profound realisations than if you just believe it “just” predicts the future
Here, the randomness is provided by cards, and that's pretty much it.
TempleOS and its god words ? Similar concept.
If it remains on the entertainment level that is absolutely all right, I like that, enjoy that actually! Good play or relaxation for the brain.
I think most people believe tarot cards are not a magical thing and they also don't think it's an interactive and creative way to get some random inspirational quotes or text.
The number of people who practice tarot for entertainment of any kind is vanishingly small; and of that population, I'm not convinced that there are fewer true believers than for-fun-only folks.
Remember when we learned about how bone divination helped hunter gathers search random areas and not be stuck with the bias of hunting where you previously hunted too much?
Kind of related. But, anyway, what I'm trying to say. I also feel like it's a snake oil scam and impossibly hard to avoid dishonesty at a random sample of astrologists.
My random card reader really flipped my head around when they promised me my reading without knowing my question or answers. They asked me how I felt about my questions and some considerations I could take about the answer and outcome, based on my cards. They said it was a process to navigate your thoughts, not for future telling. And I was impressed enough at this reframing to want to try and convince a few other HN nerds to consider this point as well. Be upset about the scammers but don't miss the possibility there can be a nugget of value and process outside of what you're expecting. There tend to be reasons why people continue doing things across cultures and time (there's something they get value out of in it, usually)