I mean, if they’re fine with claiming that astrology is real to enrich themselves, why should I believe anything else they say?
They also have a habit of taking over an entire thread very quickly, much as fire consumes and spreads quickly through what it touches (which is why 'flame' is a good metaphor for the corresponding kind of internet comment).
There are a lot of past explanations of these principles in case any of it is helpful:
repetition is bad for curiosity https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
good discussion is specific, not generic https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
reflective responses are better than reflexive ones https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
trying to avoid the internet callout/shaming culture https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
(and so on)
Typical Capricorn.
As an engineer who's also studied a bit of astrology and has played around with how one might produce a description language to support the astrological symbolic apparatus, I think a functional language is a great choice. The idea of strict types defined as a set of symbols makes perfect sense in astrological terms. Although I'm much more familiar with OCaml/SML than Haskell, a basic outline would be something like:
type Planet = Sun | Moon | Mercury | ...
type Sign = Aries | Taurus | ... | Pisces
type House = 1 | 2 | ... | 12
Using this, you could represent a whole chart in a pretty straightforward way. And then you could have higher order constructs, which represent meaningful formal relationships, like:
type Aspect = (Planet, Planet, Degree)
type Rulership = (Planet, Sign)
etc. It's a pretty natural idea, to use a strong type system to represent what is effectively a formal language (astrology).
Sorry, how does this justify lying and deceiving people for profit?
> she has a deep background in philosophy and psychoanalytic theory,
By "deep background" you mean she got a BA in psychology?
Who here exactly is being lied to? Some people feel that doctors lie to them, so they don't go to doctors. Similarly, if someone feels like astrology is all a big lie, they don't have to use the app.
> By "deep background" you mean she got a BA in psychology?
I mean she's done quite a lot of reading on enlightenment and modern philosophy, can hold a conversation on Kant, Hegel, etc. as well as Freud, Lacan, RD Laing, and others. Humanities degrees tell me very little about the quality of someone's understanding.
I've never understood this as an argument for veracity. There are lots of ideas and practices with "deep roots". Blood letting has "deep roots", yet we've pretty thoroughly debunked humor balancing and good medicine.
Astrology, like other psuedosciences, seems built on the notion that if you add enough lingo it becomes valid. Yet a quick skeptical consideration of "Ok, what does the position of a rock in the sky have to do with my day to day life" seems like it should readily debunk it. Why does the position of Jupiter, for example, have more effect on my life than say the position of the moon? Or 624 Hector? If I throw a rock over someone's head does that have an appreciable effect on their "luck" or how their day will go? Does the composition of said rock impact a person's luck?
It doesn't particularly matter. You can use a randomly generated chart and it will still "work", because the use of astronomy in astrology is basically as RNG, and astrology itself is a psychological language.
> Blood letting has "deep roots", yet we've pretty thoroughly debunked humor balancing and good medicine.
Do you really think modern medical psychology has moved past the "blood letting" phase of knowledge? If so, then why are so many people still depressed, anxious, etc, despite all the supposed advances?
The fact is that psychology has a long way to go before it can be treated as a proper physical science, requiring researchers to bridge vast gaps in neuroscience and the structure of experience, which includes the huge and significant role of symbols in life.
As it stands, the person with the most knowledge of your own life is... you, and tools like astrology function as mirrors to help you avoid your own biases when developing self-knowledge. This is entirely unlike any medical intervention I'm aware of, and cannot be compared in kind.
A common misunderstanding of psychology is that it's about "curing" psychological illnesses. Almost all psychological illnesses are chronic and not diseases that can be cured. As such, the work of a psychologist is almost always around managing, not curing.
You wouldn't, for example, look at the physical therapy an amputee receives and go "Physical therapy must be no better than blood letting because amputees still exist!"
> The fact is that psychology has a long way to go before it can be treated as a proper physical science, requiring researchers to bridge vast gaps in neuroscience and the structure of experience, which includes the huge and significant role of symbols in life.
That's happened perhaps more than I think you'd expect. This is where, for example, SSRIs have come from. It's not random shots in the dark and guesses. The unfortunate problem is there's a bunch of stigma around taking medicine for psychological problems.
And yet, we know the precise cause and details of their situation...
> This is where, for example, SSRIs have come from. It's not random shots in the dark and guesses.
SSRIs were designed with a specific neurotransmitter in mind, but the reason why serotonin can affect what we call "depression" is, as wikipedia puts it, "somewhat uncertain". Only in the last couple of years have theoretical frameworks appeared where we can kind of develop a causal understanding, like in Friston's REBUS paper: https://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/71/3/316
The gist is that, if serotonin modulates high level neurological priors, then SSRIs lead to slightly increased plasticity wrt the environment, which can help people get "unstuck" from previous environmental priors i.e. trauma. But if their current environment is poor, then SSRIs will have no effect or make them worse. If this model is correct, then it necessitates a shift in the etiology of depression, back to the more classical psychoanalytic "epistemic" view (in which "mental illness" is equivalent to unwanted patterns of thought and action, a definition that should feel obvious to anyone who's dealt with their own psychic distress) vs the modern "neurotransmitter" view (i.e. "not enough serotonin = depressed").
The result is that any etiological understanding must include not only the present state of the individual seeking treatment, but also their environmental and historical contexts, i.e. their whole life. This problematizes the metaphor of mental illness, because, as you said, most people think you can treat mental illness like curing an infection, removing some sort of foreign element which resulted in whatever deviation from the "healthy" norm, without realizing it has to be a longer term intervention, because the foreign element is... still you.
Like physical therapy, there's plenty of stretches you can do on your own, and you're also in a unique strong position to evaluate your own environmental and historical context, compared with a therapist who can only know what you tell them (or what they can read between the lines). This is why reflective practices exist, like many religious exercises which give you a new pattern to consider (like on Yom Kippur, you think about your last year in terms of repentance, forgiveness, etc), but also like astrology, which "automatically" produces frames for contemplative reflection. The result of proper reflection is in action, which shifts the agent away from their old repetitive patterns and can actually provide the mythical-seeming cure for their mental illnesses. This form of "treatment" has been rediscovered in many traditions over the years, from Buddhism to Stoicism. It seems to only be in modern western culture where we delegate to experts the responsibility for our own psyches...
I see astrology as an entertainment product. Some folks take it way too far, and it's fine if you'd prefer to abstain. But I think that it is the same as with other vices (porn, casinos, gatcha games, etc) who, otherwise, can have very interesting technical problems.
The market for astrology already exists. Their whole thing is getting people who are into it to prefer them because their math is better.
I get the anti-pseudoscience reflex, but (1) it's the wrong way to think about astrology and (2) it's weird to pick on astrology apps for their 'ethics' when the practice is more or less benign. We're not talking about a cult where people refuse medicine for their children here.
From an employment perspective, Co-Star seems way cleaner than places where lots of people I know and like work. Better horoscopes than missile defense or spy drones or brutal retailers like Amazon. Better a stupid, fake typology than spyware that reads people's emails to hit them with more effective ads. Better to produce models of the positions of stars than models of human faces to power militarization of the Israeli border.
Re: (1)
Astrology as most people practice it is a low-stakes system of prompts for reflecting on oneself and one's environment in a way that is useful and healthy, but can easily be neglected when you're just trying to get from one day to the next. Taking it too seriously is a mistake, but it can be useful without being correct about the capacity of the power of heavenly bodies to determine human personalities or affairs.
If we had nobles using court astrologers again, I'd say attacking astrology as harmful would be valuable. But when it's more about prompting for reflection or producing a shared vocabulary of personality, I think it ranges from helpful ritual to benign nonsense.
> I don’t want to read anything written by someone making an insert religious/philosophical belief here product.
I'm not sure the what's being built takes a way from the correctness of the way something was built.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
No. You are closed-minded. The article explained three reasons why Haskell was chosen, not about converting you to believe in Astrology.
FUNCTIONS IN THE MATHEMATICAL SENSE
TYPE-DRIVEN PROGRAMMING
HASKELL MAKES ILLEGAL STATES UNREPRESENTABLE
"Haskell is optimized for developer efficiency. You can get a lot done, have a high degree of confidence that it runs reasonably without having to do too much thinking or ass-covering. We move fast & need things to be reliable. Rather than hand optimizing Doom 2 for ___, Haskell is the opposite. The computers serve us. Code is for humans to read, and only incidentally for computers to read. Code is how humans express themselves to each other and computers, and it’s up to computers to run it in a reasonably good way."
And yet you have the time to impugn other people's character here? I propose to you that your time might be better spent on your reading backlog.
You're not. If you were you will understand that astrology and other esoteric beliefs are culturally anchored to the human experience of many people in the world. In particular the self-development that many people seem to get from astrology. I don't need to believe in astrology to understand its cultural role.
I think it's completely fair to build a business around a cultural idea and use that idea as a thematic glue to teach people about self-development and self-care. If you donwload the app, you will quicky realize that's exactly what they are doing. Personally not my thing, but I respect what they do and their approach to building a business around this.