Ask HN: How to prove that astrology works? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to prove that astrology works?

33 pointszipotm55 comments

Hello, I have some astrological knowledge and want to prove that the position of the starts affects the human personality and events. I am sure about that and have enough knowledge to calculate it, but how to prove it to an audience like HN?

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Through a double blind method. Open source or publish your calculations so that anyone can derive the same personality/event results for a given set of criteria for a person. That is, without you being the intermediary, the result of the calculation performed by different people should arrive at the same result.

The result will also need to avoid the use of Barnum statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect as they are subject to interpretation.

It's actually pretty well documented that birthdates affect outcomes in society, for example in athletics (1). It's called the relative age effect (2).

You would have to control for this if you wanted to convince anyone that it was due to the positions of stellar objects.

(1) https://sportsmedicine-open.springeropen.com/articles/10.118...

(2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_age_effect

Was the phenomenon of determined in experiments that controlled for Stellar object positions?

Even then, correlation does not equal causation... so that means both astrology and the relative age effect quantitatively stand on equal ground in terms of causative possibilities.

HN's leaning against astrology is, in fact, from an empirical and logical perspective.. biased. Much of peoples' conclusions are formulated from anecdotal and circumstantial experiences, which has validity and is a conclusion I ultimately agree with... but looking at the totality of the reaction to this question, objectively it is a window into the nature of human bias.

I didn't say anything about causation vs correlation, just that the RAE is well studied. It's in essence a large amount of research on the correlation of the relative age of people that all participate in the same activities around the same dates (unsurprisingly, younger ages correlated with worse outcomes in many cases). The athletics research is interesting because of how far back the data goes, which does actually control for astrological effects as things like season start dates and school year schedules haven't been set in stone.

I think you're inferring a bias against pseudoscience, which is good because the core of learning more about our universe is skepticism and finding empirical evidence to confirm belief. I don't believe you can find any such evidence for astrology that doesn't have a far simpler and compelling explanation, thus it would be extremely difficult to convince anyone that astrology "works."

Construct a hypothesis that's testable and conduct an experiment, either directly or through the collection of evidence. Then analyze and contrast against other explanations to draw conclusions. That's what it comes down to. It doesn't sound like you have done that.

Come up with a scientific hypothesis to test your claims. How does the position of the stars affect human personality and events? What is the physical process involved? Is this effect transmitted by light? By gravity, By quantum mechanics? Your hypothesis will need to stand up to the scrutiny of known modern science. How do you account for the speed of light being a hard limit on the transmission of information, and stars being many light years away? How do you account for relativity, precession, and other effects when determining the relevance of position? Is Earth the only relevant vantage point? If so, why, and what does this imply about relativity's thesis that the universe has no preferred reference frames? If your hypothesis involves constellations, you need to explain how stars which just happen to appear in groups from Earth, in the illusory 2D plane of the sky, correlate effects across their arbitrary positions in spacetime.

Since you claim to have enough knowledge to calculate the events created by astrology, an accurate list of future events would be a good place to start, as well as a formal proof of your method for such calculation, presented for peer review.

You will also need to explain how every experiment attempting to validate astrology has found that it does not actually work, and that there is no known scientific basis by which it could even possibly work, beyond psychological effects and fraud, and why all of those experiments were wrong, and no replicable proof of astrology was possible until you and your theories came along, despite people wanting and trying to prove it true for millennia. The principles of astrology were formed at a time when human societies had a wholly supernatural worldview, before people even knew what stars were. That's going to be the difficult part, proving that ancient wizards, alchemists and soothsayers had a more valid and accurate cosmological model than modern astronomers and physicists.

Once your results have been published, peer reviewed, experimentally replicated and validated through rigorous scientific consensus, then you can submit an article about it to Hacker News. Of course by then, having essentially overturned the fundamentals of known physics and proven the existence of the supernatural, everyone will probably already know about it.

I, like most people around here, don't believe in astrology. But I think I am also more sympathetic with people with strange beliefs (or I guess a lot of ordinary girls in this case).

I think you'd be interested in knowing that Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR (and a Nobel laureate), also believed in astrology [1].

[1]: http://www.crawfordperspectives.com/documents/IAMACAPRICORN_...

Use your knowledge to make some precise predictions and state them before the event. Possibly put them in the equivalent of a sealed envelope so the predictions themselves don't influence human reactions. The prediction should be unambiguous and falsifiable.

Also, you must mean stars and planets, right? The positions of the stars take multiple human lifetimes to visibly change.

Use the scientific method, and people here will listen. That means reproducible evidence from a reputable source.

Write an horoscope for every sign every morning and publish them here every night, without saying which sign correspond to which horoscope. Ask users to take note of the most faithful description of their day. After a few month, publish the sign correspondence for every horoscope you've published and let users calculate the times they matched their sign to the "correct" horoscope. If they all match considerably more than 1/12, you might be onto something.

(this ignoring the challenge of defining "night" and "morning" for an international audience)

I hate that this is flagged. HN's penchant for self-stifling interesting discussions is probably its worst feature.

Does astrology work? Almost certainly not. (Though I will suggest that the position of ONE PARTICULAR STAR could have some measurable effects.)

However, a discussion wherein a community of smart folks use logic and the scientific method to lead someone from a pasture of mysticism to one of rational thinking could be a very interesting discussion indeed. Especially since we seem to be in the middle of a resurgence of unscientific thinking...

Do astrological teachings share how the information was originally devined? Do books/gurus/etc track provenance of information?

(Disclaimer: I do not, and will never, believe in astrology.)

Tell me your birthday year, month, date, hour, minute and location. Don't need name. I will tell you some major life events to prove.

You ignored my question and instead asked for information that would de-anonymize me. If you knew who I was, of course you could tell me some major life events just by using a search engine, no stars/planets necessary.

If astrology works for you then use that edge. Use the stars to predict lottery numbers (events) or how important people might influence events (personality). If you want to persuade other people it works show them how you got rich from your knowledge of astrology. If you can reliably predict events or the behavior of other people based on the stars you have a big advantage.

Writing books and giving talks to profit from the gullibility of people doesn’t count.

1) Make a survey that classifies respondents into one of the 12 astrological signs

2) give it to a lot of people, the more the better

3) also collect their birthdays

4) do a regression analysis to determine how well the sign based on birthday predicts the sign based on the survey response

5) profit

Good luck

If astrology "works" then it makes testable predictions.

Everything else is religion.

Watts on this subject: https://youtu.be/83Mw-tF1AdI?t=94

First question I have is, what have you seen that has convinced you that astrology calculations work?

Many times I was able to calculate* (not predict or read) multiple* past events with extreme accuracy. Chances of knowing that by accident are very few. For me the link between planets and events are still unknown, but it works. Similar to the moon phases and stock market prices which are up ~3% on average on full moon etc.

I can prove that to you if you are interested.

If sun signs (I am a Taurus) were valid wouldn’t personality tests correlate with when you were born?

Prove it to individuals before proving it to an audience; you'll need the practice!

A lot of hate for this on HN. My challenge to the community, assume this was a good faith argument, how would you convince someone to structure a test so they were convinced astrology wasn't real? If you can't structure at least a rough outline of experiments then you don't really understand why astrology can't be real. If you defer to experts without understanding why they hold this belief then you're ceding critical thinking to someone else. If presented with evidence that astrology was real based on verifiable, repeatable experiments, then you can't claim to be logical.

Now, assuming this was a good faith question, the answer is that you need to provide a series of repeatable and testable experiments that can be independently verified by others using the same protocol [0].

There are many confounding factors that will skew results and is one of the reasons why "blinding" experiments were invented, because experimenters that had an expectation of an outcome from an experiment could pollute results from interacting with subjects [1]. As another commenter mentioned, these confounding factors can be extremely subtle [2] so extreme care has to be taken when doing these experiments. The subtlety can even extend to just repeating the experiment over a lifetime until you get a "significant" result that can be published [3].

If you were to do this in earnest, I would suggest starting with a deep literature review. There are many people doing research into ESP and other supernatural beliefs. They all haven't come up with anything accepted by the scientific community at large. It's good to understand what kind of experiments they set up so that you can see what you might be able to do and how you could replicate or extend those studies. My apologies, I don't have anything focusing on astrology specifically but a good starting point is James Randi [4] [5], the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Skeptical Inquirer [6] [7].

Once you're in a position to actually conduct an experiment, my suggestion would be to start with something that is as simple as possible, with an aim to reduce any confounding factors and be independently repeatable and verifiable by others. There is a long history of experimentation in this area that has provided no evidence for supernatural effects, so a claim of supernatural effect is considered extraordinary and will need extraordinary evidence to be accepted by the community at large.

You also have to make sure to guard against people intentionally trying to sabotage your experiment as this area is full of people who are adept at lying convincingly.

There will always be people who hold irrational belief but if you provide a real experiment that is repeatable and testable independently that can show the effect you believe is real, this will convince people of rational minds that it's real.

I would also urge you to adopt a scientific mindset in that if you find no evidence supporting your hypothesis or with evidence that explains why you believed your hypothesis to be true without the need for supernatural effect, then you should abandon your hypothesis. Put another way, if you're asking an audience to believe you if you have evidence, then it's hypocritical to not change your views based on evidence as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinded_experiment

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30704665

[3] https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/06/daryl-bem-prove...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi

[5] https://web.randi.org/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Skeptical_Inquir...

[7] https://skepticalinquirer.org/

You'd be better of proving that Jesus was conceived without sperm.

Make predictions. Simple

Read my comment history and then tell me my date of birth!

I'm no maestro of astrology, but I would guess your zodiac sign is Sagittarius :-)

> but how to prove it to an audience like HN?

Sorry, you can't.

I can tell you your major past life events only by knowing your year, month, date, hour, location and minute of birth.

That’s an impossible task - because it isn’t.

There's already a wealth of parapsychology research out there which "proves" the existence of all sorts of supernatural effects with standard scientific techniques.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...

That is to say, there's probably no amount of proof you could show me which would convince me.

Perhaps you could also prove how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while you are at it.

This has got to be a joke

What's interesting is the upvotes it's receiving. Maybe some people are interested in seeing the discussion it might lead to.

The man is asking for the opportunity to prove his point. We should listen. Because throughout human history humanity has exiled people who had the crazy idea that the sun was the center of the solar system.

We've been wrong before, and we're likely going to be wrong again.

That the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade and ideas.

In light of that knowledge that we may be wrong, the best course of action, the safest course of action, is to go ahead and listen to the ideas on the other side.

The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself verified by the scientific method.

Those are the ideas that we can safely act upon. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge.

That, at any rate, is the theory of the US constitution itself. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

It’s worth making a distinction between new and unproven ideas versus old and unproven ideas.

Old and _disproven_.

Astrologers make vague predictions that handily avoid falsification. Any fraudulent operation involving prophecies would obviously do this to stay as seemingly legitimate as long as possible. Not saying astrology is illegitimate but it is certainly very probable.

Therefore technically speaking, your statement is wrong. Astrology has NOT been disproven.

Your line of thinking works for an astrologer's individual claims, but falls short of applying to astrology as a whole. We _know_ astrology to be systematically _incorrect_.

Putting two underscores around the word "_know_" doesn't lend any credence to your claim.

Nothing can be known or proven in science. We don't know in the same way as we don't know whether or not Christianity or any other major religion is correct or "_incorrect_".

The underscores are used to indicate italics in markdown. I wasn't being flippant.

> Nothing can be known or proven in science.

Since we're trying to be pedantic, on the contrary, things can very much be known or proven in "natural science" (I am assuming that you are not talking about "formal science", because then your comment would be even more unreasonable). Of course whether something is provable or knowable depends on the nature of the thing itself.

> we don't know whether or not Christianity or any other major religion is correct or incorrect

Theology is a big can of worms, but these big objects should be broken down into smaller pieces: whereas science cannot possibly prove or disprove the existence of a "God" (depending on the definition we use, and the characteristics we ascribe to such an entity), science does very much inform us on the boundaries within which, or outside of which, theology can reside. For instance, we know that it is impossible to transform water into wine, at least in any real sense and in conditions relevant to biblical texts.

>I am assuming that you are not talking about "formal science", because then your comment would be even more unreasonable

I am talking about formal science. Nothing can be proven in science. Proof is the domain of logics and maths not science. Nothing in science is axiomatic as every supposed "law" is subject to a contrarian observation at any point in time.

This isn't pedantry. Astrology has not been proven or falsified. Neither have religions. That's why religions are so popular. Maintaining an unbiased outlook towards all things including things that sound fantastic is the epitome of neutrality. Heliocentricism at one point in time sounded just as absurd as astrology. Galileo was exiled for his ideas. To make sure we don't exile a man for presenting a previously unknown truth we must listen to the other side despite how contrarian it sounds.

>Theology is a big can of worms, but these big objects should be broken down into smaller pieces: whereas science cannot possibly prove or disprove the existence of a "God" (depending on the definition we use, and the characteristics we ascribe to such an entity), science does very much inform us on the boundaries within which, or outside of which, theology can reside. For instance, we know that it is impossible to transform water into wine, at least in any real sense and in conditions relevant to biblical texts.

Science cannot prove that you can't turn water into wine. This is an assumption you made by stringing together tidbits of anecdotal knowledge. That is not science. It is just a reasonable assumption, but an assumption nonetheless.

Put it this way. What sort of scientific experiment can you run to prove definitively that water can't be turned into wine? What sort of trial should be run and how many times do these trials need to be repeated before you can say definitively that water can't be turned into wine?

You likely can't think of a way. And this is because it's impossible. Literally. At this point in time you may not be able to put your finger why it's impossible, but even without knowing why you'll find that your unable to think of an experiment that can pull off a proof.

To bring it back to the main point. Your assumption that astrology is not true is reasonable, but it is still an assumption. Due to the fact that it is an assumption we must always be open to alternative explanations to make sure we don't make the same mistakes we did in the past.

Wouldn't our current understanding of chemistry be enough to prove that turning water into wine is not possible? Or viceversa, be able to prove that it is possible?

I.e. if we had the capability to transmute elements (which I think is theoretically possible, given enough energy and technology?), could we turn H2O molecules into all the other molecules needed for wine?

> Wouldn't our current understanding of chemistry be enough to prove that turning water into wine is not possible? Or viceversa, be able to prove that it is possible?

This is just stringing together random facts and figures to form a logical deduction. That's not science.

To do science you need to be able to run a trial and observe an event that supports your hypothesis. Then you need to run this trial several times to make sure that the observed event is consistent. Even after this at any subsequent time after the experiment there can be new observations that contradict the hypothesis.

My question is what is... what is the experiment you would run to prove water can't be turned into wine. Science involves evidence that must be observable in some form.

The medical industry does not simply use our knowledge of biochemistry to engineer medicine and give it to people. They run trials and testing to increase confidence around the efficacy of the medicine. That is science.

I think I was still asleep. You are correct.

I don't think you could prove that.

Disproven ideas are a subset of the unproven ideas.

Trying to distinguish whether or not a specific idea from astrology is or is not “disproven” means you waste time arguing about topics many of which are too vague to be falsifiable.

So I chose the word “unproven” on purpose and I stand by it, because it’s the correct word.

I agree with you, my intention was not to suggest you chose the incorrect word, but rather to push your idea even farther.

Of course the problem with using the word "disproven" like I did, and like you correctly pointed out, is that we're referring to a very loosely defined and nebulous set of ideas. To disprove something requires a precise definition of the thing in the first place.

I would argue that this difficulty is not necessarily fatal to the argument. It is an inevitable difficulty (and please pardon me as I get into a semantic argument), because the word "astrology" cannot be made to map to real mechanisms, phenomena, or "real life things". The set of ideas we refer to under any reasonable definition of "astrology" are incoherent with reality as a whole.

One could reduce the set of ideas behind astrology to be "merely unfalsifiable" and/or "merely unfalsified" by eliminating all demonstrably incorrect ideas, but then I am not sure that we would be left with enough ideas to still call it "astrology": the thing would have lost its essence and most of its usual meaning.

The approach I just described is reductionist, or deconstructive. Consider the inverse (or "constructive") approach: start with an obviously-wrong idea, and attach to it many other subordinate or secondary ideas, some of which might be right, some of which might be unprovable. Give this set of ideas a new name. As a whole, the set of ideas is still wrong if it is essentially wrong, or predicated on wrong ideas. The addition of extra ideas to the collection only serves to confuse people, but doesn't make it "less wrong" as a whole.

Technically nothing in science is proven.

I don't think I understand how are disproven ideas a subset of unproven ones.

Disproven means, "proven to be false", while unproven means there is no proof yet, either positive or negative, right?

How can one be a subset of the other?

The earth being the center of the solar system was an old and ingrained idea at the time. It was so old an ingrained that the mere mention of heliocentricism prompted the exact same emotions and reactions you are seeing now towards astrology.

I personally agree with you. But I feel it is wrong to call what he says a joke or simply not give him the opportunity to prove himself. That would be a mistake that humanity has made several times resulting in delayed progress of many revolutionary ideas.

Our bias constructs a reality so believable that we cannot differentiate it from the objective truth. To escape our own bias means going against our instincts to listen to an idea that seems preposterous or "crazy,"

I'd go with a "troll"...

As a scientist, the comments entertaining this question make me sad.

Astrology doesn't "work". If it did, then it would be at least in part a science.

Astrology is not a science, but a pseudoscience.

Or a science too complex to be proven?

I have a personal theory that Astrology did actually work to a small degree in ancient times but it worked by coordinating people in a kind of mematic way that was replaced by the active coordination we do now via the internet etc. It didn't have any real supernatural power.

In theory if we were in a simulation I might expect there to be instructions and cheat codes. Maybe even Easter Eggs. Astrology could be instructions. Sorcery could be cheat codes. Now you just need to map them out in a way anyone can use them, thus enabling scientific method assuming the simulation does not circumvent a validation process if and when it recognizes it is being tested or monitored. i.e. the VW test.

There is one theory according to Douglas Adams that if one figures this out the universe will reset and recreate itself in a much more complex manor. There are other theories that this has already occurred.

The problem with simulation theory, to me, is that everyone seems to believe it implies our universe is literal software running on a literal computer as we understand it, because that's what was portrayed in the Matrix. No one ever seems to think outside of that box. If the universe is simulated, then the nature of the simulation is going to be something beyond our comprehension, some higher-dimensional mind-shattering Lovecraftian construct which emits not a simulation in code which somehow interprets itself as reality, but actual physical reality. What it's not going to be is just a big Unity game where you can noclip out of the map or something.

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