I was an astrologer – here's how it really works (2019)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I wonder about that.
I know a lot of tech, 'fans' who really believe in n technology's (and to some extent some big name tech personalities) ability to solve a lot of problems ... almost to a magical extent. They love TED style talks where through tech somehow hand wave the actual problem and human nature leading to what seems like an inevitable a solution.
I could see those folks getting into such a thing whole hog.
Like a Ouija board it's harmless as long as you don't take it seriously.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9rive [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
My impression is that most VC doesn't really care all that much what's in the middle, but I may be wholly misinformed.
There are definitely a lot of good vc backed companies but there is also a lot of brain power being put towards less altruistic pursuits.
Let people have their fun wasting their money, as no harm is done to them that they didn't choose for themselves.
Whether meatspace or in-app, the astrologists aren't saying, "come here to receive generic life advice based on (at best) educated guesses about you or (at worst) output of a random number generator". No, they're promising reliable advice, and back it with absurd "explanations". It's not much different than any other kind of fraud - it only survives because it's been an established practice since way before science allowed us to call bullshit on it.
(I don't buy the usual argument to grant it plausible deniability: that their customers know they're being lied to, and consider this entertainment. I've not heard of an astrologist checking that their customers realize they're participating in a LARP.)
And since you mentioned gambling: it's not all free choice either. There's a spectrum there. Some people can handle it responsibly as a form of entertainment. Other people, arguably most people, are at risk of getting hooked and losing their ability to freely choose whether to play or not.
Putting the general question of free will aside, it's inaccurate to consider people as agents who mostly make informed choices and occasionally let their emotions get the best of them. On the contrary, humans mostly do things on autopilot, and occasionally find enough power of will to make a choice and override their default behavior.
Yes, as humans have to determine the truth in all things they engage with themselves. Religion, association, food, work, investment... we leave the risk assessment to the person whose money is on the line.
> And since you mentioned gambling: it's not all free choice either. There's a spectrum there. Some people can handle it responsibly as a form of entertainment. Other people, arguably most people, are at risk of getting hooked and losing their ability to freely choose whether to play or not.
And yet we allow it, because they risk no one but themselves. Some of those people who get "hooked" also, by their own free will, later stop gambling, so I am skeptical of your "some people aren't exercising a choice" dichotomy.
Except when we don't, because it doesn't scale. Attacker vs. Defender problem. A big chunk of regulation - like the parts that define what is fraud, or ones concerned with product safety - are a recognition of the fact that people cannot, in practice, assess trustworthiness of things they engage themselves in. They'd spend all their time doing only that, and never achieving anything. Society needs high level of baseline trust to be maintained just to function.
> And yet we allow it, because they risk no one but themselves.
We actually limit it strongly, precisely because it hurts a lot of people other than the players. Gambling addiction is a problem whose main victims are the families of the addicted. It's a type of problem similar to alcoholism - its spread destroys communities and increases poverty. And so games of chance are a highly regulated space.
If you say your app is using mystical powers to make predictions, how is that not fraud? Maybe some of the buyers know they are just for entertainment, but many of them will be true believers. Those people are being defrauded.
I do think some of the moral issues (and likely all of the legal issues) go away when the app clearly states "for entertainment purposes only", but it is still a bit problematic.
Some factoids:
- Remembering birthdays is easy for me, because I still get everyone’s astrological profile “for free” when I hear someone’s birthday (it’s a subconscious thing).
- Sometimes I still give people a reading for fun and tell them upfront that I believe it’s all nonsense. Yet, some people spontaneously start to believe in astrology after my reading, despite the evidence I give.
All in all, fun and games but IMO a waste of time.
[0] For lack of a better comparison.
As mentioned in the article, sometimes she was more of a very cheaply priced therapist. Just letting people talk and feel heard. A naturopath friend of mine says something very similar. It's amazing how much better people do when they feel like they have someone to talk to who really cares and will take their time with them. The pills the patients leave with may not do much, but the 90 minutes she spent in intimate conversation with them really appears to.
I think a lot of people who use these services sort of know that this is the case, even if it's not explicit in their mind.
It is fraud and is a predatory practice preying on people's ignorance and gullibility.
This is like saying that other flim flam artists are an 'alright stand in'. Other forms of fraud are generally outlawed. Why should this one be allowed.
Not just that, but these kinds of practices (e.g. homeopathy etc too) they specifically prey on the sick and weakest members of society.
Religion is not an instinct. Not on the individual level, and not on the societal level, where there is only a manifestation of principles of conformity.
Optimism and sociability are intelligible enough. There is no need to introduce magical properties except to bamboozle the credulous.
That there are so many examples of mythology and other fables indicates that humans enjoy story telling. What we call _religion_ is just the mythology and fables that we stopped calling _sacred_ when the old power structure collapsed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesicular_monoamine_transporte...
I think what is much more likely is that there is fervour to conform and social value in appearing to conform. What people _really_ believe is clearly much more pragmatic.
It is a form of divination.
The two concepts have little to do with each other.
Christianity and Judaism have explicit prohibitions against sorcery, divination, fortune telling, etc. (I suspect it’s the same in Islam.)
Folks don’t attend church to learn the future, get readings, or anything of the sort.
The main religions existent today deal with working towards perfection, defined by a Supreme Being.
Perhaps there is an ‘instinct’ for religion. There is certainly an ‘instinct’ for a quick-and-easy way to peer into the future. These two instincts are not the same and, in most cases, those driven by the first ‘instinct’ shun the latter and vice versa.
Most folks attend church for a sense of community and to find purpose and meaning in the void of human existence. Astrology provides something similar. Obviously it is pseudoscience. But I'm not sure how much that actually matters. Like the article says, people don't really listen to what she says, they use it to confirm what they already thought, or as a frame to help organize their scattered thoughts.
And just like religion, people can take it to ridiculous places.
But, you clearly have little knowledge of religion and what motivates those with a religious outlook.
That’s all.
You seem to view religion and astrology on the same spectrum. That would be insulting, but it seems to be coming from a place of ignorance as opposed to malice.
A shame. That could be an interesting study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pYHN9iC9I
"Amazing mind reader reveals his 'gift'"
Obviously I have no idea what she said to you, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are at least 10 other people out there who could have heard word for word the same thing and thought it was about them specifically.
Your post tells me you have a dry sense of humour that makes connections quickly, which sometimes leaves you making jokes that go right over the heads of others. That means when the urge takes you, you can be the life of the party - despite the fact you can be shy, especially around new people.
I can also tell you're naturally a bit disorganised - the kind of person who has unsorted photos on their phone, and that you hang onto notes to yourself that are significantly out of date. But you pride yourself as an independent thinker, and don't accept others' statements without satisfactory proof.
Because you basically did describe me perfectly. Well, me and millions of other people too. Guess I’m not that special after all.
They read them, and most of them get pretty emotional describing how specific it is to them and how much it's affecting them.
But the trick is, he gives the exact same reading to every person.
We don't see what the reading is, but I've always thought- what if everybody in the room really does share enough human experiences that a reading (somewhat generic enough) really does cover almost everybody in the room.
It is funny how everyone who I question suddenly starting ghosting me right after.
Even in a universe where I did 100% know the colour of your carpet via some form of clairvoyance (which is hardly an economically useful service), I've now understood that you will continue to react with confrontational scepticism.
By asking this question, you have disqualified yourself as a client - not only of services which have no supernatural powers, but also of hypothetical "true" fortune tellers. Expect to be ghosted.
Since I would expect the outcome to be the same in both cases, this doesn't prove or disprove anything to me.
The first provides a haiku which they claim encapsulates the point in time and space where an eclipse or other significant astronomical event will occur, insofar as your heart is open to it.
The second replies that they are perfectly capable of doing it, but they believe your request constitutes "confrontational skepticism" and ghosts you.
The other provides a latitude, longitude, and UTC timestamp.
The idea that skepticism is somehow "confrontational" and warrants "ghosting" is a lie propagated for the purpose of blurring the line between real and fake predictive ability. This third type of person does exist; they're not even uncommon. When you encounter types one or two, it's not your fault. They're just the "noise floor" ever present in the search for a good prediction, or a product that does what it says it does. Work around them. Find the third type.
Your example of skepticism isn't confrontational, in the way that I intended it to mean (as a modifier), because you're reasonably skeptical about what is being directly claimed.
i.e. when someone claims to be able to predict a future solar eclipse, you don't get them to prove their predictive powers by asking them to predict the colour of your new carpet. That would be confrontational. You'd be ghosted, also by the scientist.
In this hypothetical, you are clairvoyant. This is an exceptional talent; if demonstrably repeatable, it's one-of-a-kind. Somebody asks that you prove yourself as a seer by telling them the color of their carpet. You actually know the color, but you choose not to say because you perceive the challenge as confrontational.
To me, that is not the behavior of an extraordinary individual. It's the behavior of a fraud.
You should choose not to engage (in this hypothetical) because you have better things to do with your talent than spend time engaging with people acting unduly negatively towards you.
It's not fraud, it's normal behaviour - in this universe. It's advice I would give to anyone.
I don’t know what “better things to do” you’re imagining a clairvoyant would occupy themselves with before having proven themselves beyond the shadow of a doubt to their clients.
How many times more valuable is the advice of a seer who I know for a fact has “the sight” than that of one who I doubt? Say, if I’m the POTUS or something.
To analogise this with the original comment in this thread:
"Last time someone told me they were an actor I simply asked them to audition, for a different part, in front of me" - would be more clearly unacceptable.
If you knew the color of the couch, it costs you nothing to blow my mind. You’re crazy if you think the right and normal thing to do in that scenario is to refuse. If you don’t want to be asked to demonstrate an extraordinary power, then don’t claim it in the first place! If I conversationally mention that I can do six figure arithmetic in my head, I fully expect to be asked “what’s 357453/737901”.
I think we’ve lost track of the fact that the first thing that happens in this conversation is somebody chooses to mention that they possess an extraordinary power. One that can be demonstrated conversationally, even.
Years later in Boston I saw a sign advertising psychic readings. So I went in and sat for a reading. But with one difference. This time I resolved to make no expression or affirmative commentary whatsoever. I kept a neutral gaze, and at most I would say “I see” if she was waiting for a reply.
The reader was flustered, and nothing seemed accurate. Of course for a true experiment I’d have to go back and visit the priestess, but I suspect she was simply good at reading me.
Note that it isn’t necessarily a useless practice. I believe the priestess picked up on one aspect of my personality I hadn’t noticed. It had stuck out as a wrong description, but years later a major personal experience let me see it was actually quite accurate.
Again nothing earth shattering, I just think she noticed something about me no one had outright said. So, someone skilled in human nature, good at reading people and well motivated could actually provide a valuable service for some people
And you could argue that they shouldn’t exist. And shouldn’t be able to prescribe. But the fact that they did and that they could meant many ill people recovered.
The primary problem wasn’t quality of care. It was access. Going from no care to some care is of huge significance.
Likewise, I suspect a focus on infallibility of healthcare professionals elsewhere drives up prices and actually makes outcomes worse for a large class of people because they simply do not have access due to the corresponding increase in cost of care.
A lot of mental health treatment is likely non-pharmacological and so astrologers and the like provide a valuable healthcare service to society. The category distinction permits them to fail at healthcare. It also permits people who cannot access the formal system (with its hundreds of dollars of continued assessments) to access a lightweight form of it.
I am wholly in favour of their existence.
He did my star chart and said "you're hired, I can work with you" - my resume was rather secondary.
I saw it as an entertainment product at the time. We sold a computer generated personal analysis for like $30. But when people called that they are completely broke and spent their last money on this analysis which will fix all their problems, it got too much for me and I got out.
The only problem comes when the therapist both doesn't believe in what they are doing and is actively trying to maximize their own income. This will cause them to intentionally cause distress in the patient/client in order to be paid to relieve it.
"Most horoscopes ask what month you were born. Co–Star asks what minute. Powered by AI that merges NASA data with the insight of human astrologers."
That is why scrambling the newspaper list wouldn't matter: it started out scrambled, better.
It is quite a sophisticated psychological toolkit, and relatively cheap to use, vs. e.g. the US medical system.
There are other functions. When you have a hard decision, the harder it is, the less it matters which alternative you choose. The consequences may be heaven vs. hell, but you can't tell up front, or the choice wouldn't be hard. Not choosing isn't on the list, but often the consequences of stalling are worse than the others: It is often better to try and see (and maybe fail and bail) than to wonder forever.
So, it helps people take a next step, where they have been taught hesitancy and fear.
Most of its value would collapse if people relying on it understood all this.
There's no magic involved, but that doesn't mean it's useless. A self-help book doesn't magically fix the way you react to difficulties in life. It does, however, give you another way to think about things and encourage you to focus on different aspects than you would normally.
Needless to say, just because a system is complex and based on some concepts taken from nature, it doesn't make its claims true.
Worse, with the way standard statistical methods have been laid out, if you ignore the fuqedness of the question and go looking for correlations anyway, you are virtually guaranteed to find all sorts of them. About 1 in 20 things you think to look at will yield a statistically significant result. By definition.
The classic XKCD on this effect is https://xkcd.com/882/
That's the weird thing: astrology done right isn't vague, broadly applicable cold-reading. The confirmation bias helps, but it's super faceted, and still manages to be right more than wrong.
Nowadays I chalk that up to something akin to the birthday paradox, plus maybe some memory construction as TFA mentions, but I've done some insanely detailed readings that were kinda spooky.
Source: was super into astrology as a teen. I had/have huge thick tomes of charts.
This is the standard that most apply to it, including most in this discussion.
What I'm saying is that engaging with symbols is a creative act that can be useful and participatory. A persons natal chart, if read correctly, provides a web of symbology that the reader can engage with in order to stimulate the imagination. If one comes to the chart with a question and plays with the symbols, answers can arise that are unexpected and often startling in their usefulness. This does not make the response true in an objective sense ("such and such planetary position means x") but rather, it can provide answers in a similar way that other art forms provide answers.
The difference with Astrology, however, is that the symbolic art used to engage with questions is a highly developed and extensive system, and has been refined over the millennia. A good analogy would be a psychological programming language that is thousands of years old, with libraries and coroutines that one can implement to help interpret general questions about human nature.
One of the things I became very aware of, while working on the site, was the potential harm it could do if somebody took it even half-way seriously. I suddenly got very panicky about the consequences of claiming that "bad things might happen to you" because of some entirely fictitious "elemental flux in the aether". I went back through all the copy I'd written to add in a lot of "talk to your friends" and "go visit your doctor" advice - mostly to ease my own worries.
The website failed entirely in its main purpose, which was to promote the book. But I've kept the pages up for sentimental reasons - not many people can claim that they've invented an entire prediction system from scratch!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472149 443 points 2 years ago 407 comments
The people made researchs and it turned out they were born 2h before or after, changing the ascendant significatively.
I thinkits good to not believe in it, especially people who bullshit through it, but maybe not everything is science in the end.
Simply stating that science may not be able to show us everything that is true does not get you any closer to justified belief of any particular thing which you think science cannot show.