One day I was having an informal diner with people that, in another context, could have been business partners.
One guy was making a killing with an astrology service by phone. He started with those text message based games, that were popular in the 2000'. Remember? "Send 'love' to this number to know if he loves you".
And eventually created a full phone call based business with about 200 freelancer astrologists and mediums. He just redirected, and took a cut. He made banks.
What he told me that night was that 99% of his customer base were women.
"You have to see astrology as porn for women", he said. "Porn public is mostly male, astrology mostly female. Both know it's not real, and most won't spend more than a few minutes on it. But many pay for it even if they would never say they do".
Some form of quick reward system gets invoked in the brain with this apparently. Well still better than looking for tobacco kicks or chocolate instead.
You're selling a service you know is bullshit and liken to porn. Personally I would not be proud to say I run that business. I would rather that these businesses didn't exist, and so I don't want to contribute to perpetuating them.
Of course there's the "fulfilling the market need" type of answer, but that's basically saying you will do anything for money regardless of morals and ethics.
> you will do anything for money regardless of morals and ethics.
I think you may have answered your own question.
They would see it as just as valid a business as an author that sells fiction books. Depending on their background this may be understandable, or not. I know a gay guy in Toronto that runs a porn empire, he doesn't care one bit about other people's opinion on it. Given infinite time he would spend it all on watching porn so for him it's a natural to want to be on the supply side, he understands his audience perfectly and the way his business is set up (co-op) gives everybody in it their own share of the take.
What I think you'll find is that morality and what is ethical can differ greatly from one person to the next and that it is possible that someone disagrees strongly with you on what is ethical or moral and that all you will end up doing is to argue the case based on your own experience and your own (cultural) background without ever arriving at some idea about what 'absolute' morality or ethics would look like.
You can see this very clearly in debates around abortion, war and other controversial subjects. People on both sides of those arguments fervently believe that they (and only they) are in the right and that everybody else is delusional, amoral and un-ethical.
If that is the case, what is the pleasure they get out of it? Porn triggers the pleasure centers that sex triggers... but astrology, what does that trigger? Sense of security that you "know" your future after reading your horoscope? Or what? Did the guy have any theory about that?
Extrapolating it to anything else than that would be to read too much into an anecdote given at a diner.
No, it's comfort in knowing that some(thing|one) else is controlling your destiny. It's not about knowing your future. It's about knowing that there exists a path you're being ushered along.
To say an astrology hotline is strictly equivalent to an orgasm is silly, but for women the circuitry is very nuanced so I wouldn't be surprised if the same neurons were firing.
That's about exactly my experience. Half my female friends (and about as many on dating platforms), and about three in four of my gay friends. Not a single straight guy ever talks to me about star signs.
Astrology got me out of an intro to stats final. You could write a paper using stats in lieu of the final, if your grades were high enough. I got a list of DOB and declared majors for each UGs from the University, hypothesized the most likely sun sign for each major, and tested whether the number of students with the characteristic Sun sign was significantly higher. Pre-VisiCalc, IBM360 era. Huge ream of 17”x12” pin-fed green and white computer paper, sharpened pencil.
Twelve hypotheses, three significant at the .05 level. There may have been a wee bit of what the kids today call p-hacking but it would have passed the social science standards at the time.
The most significant result was 7 out of 12 International Studies majors were in the Sun sign of Libra (roughly p=1/12), and the expected correlation between diplomacy and Libra was commonly cited by their literature. That was unexpectedly strong. People have gotten funded on less.
Just like in any occupation, you can be good at your job, but completely bananas outside of it.
I asked if it's possible to be good at your job while believing in far out stuff.
My friend said "seems like it". But I have a feeling the mental baggage that comes from wacky beliefs is going to affect other aspects of life and work in a negative way. But that's just my opinion.
We just need to be right enough long enough within a limited scope. That's what makes civilization successful. Specialization.
I was working on an astrology widget for a portal site, and read every advice in it every sign for months at lengths.
None of the advice were ever highly impacting, nor seemed to have a chance to bring problematic results. At best it felt like a nice way to get some variety into someone's life ("wear something green today to improve your luck")
In that light, I feel caring about astrology could be just another hobby, it's pretty innocuous.
”Your week starts you being stressed, but come Friday things will look out better. Weekend will energize you. Remember to care for yourself. Coming months will offer you a happy surprise.”
Personal astrology then has similar aspects as tarot and geneal counseling. As any roleplaying game enthusiast knows, mapping life to fixed ruleset is great fun. What makes this pathological is if people actually believe this stuff. But in the non-pathological case I suppose it works similarly as therapy for non-clinical stuff - people helped to identify their issues and are coached to work through them. People are really blind to aspects of their own life (speaking from experience) and need things pointed out to them in a safe setting.
Personally I feel it’s infuriating bs, but recognize it’s mostly harmless and may actually help some people work out some issues.
An actual example: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/horoscope/taurus/daily-20230...
> You get some weird news early on that leaves you feeling kind of funky for most of the day, but it's not all bad! You know deep down that things are right where they're supposed to be.
You won't get anything that leads to direct action from these tidbits of non-comited vagueness.
It’s always hard to put these things together, though it’s actually very stimulating to talk with them about it. It’s an entire world for them, loaded with meaning and salience. It doesn’t take away from how intelligent I think they are (they both possess capabilities I can’t fathom), but I don’t think it’ll ever properly make sense to me.
(I'm gay and haven't noticed astrology being particularly popular with gay men, though it may be regional.)
Not one which works, however.
They both purport to tell you what sort of person you are, with an explanation for how they do this which might be vaguely convincing to some non-experts, but are, statistically, meaningless.
> At the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, MBTI testing became highly popular among young South Koreans who were using it in an attempt to find compatible dating partners
Astrology is also not, as it turns out, the only woo used in dating.
This comes off a puerile take, akin to puritan paranoia over DND and comic books.
How did you find yourself in your group, mostly by happenstance, or choices?
Do you have a separate group that you talk about important things with?
...is it us?
My understanding as an outsider is that astrology, tarot, etc function as a shared vocabulary and mythology to communicate about mental health and life's troubles. I think for most people the occult elements are largely aesthetic.
Throughout history people have used occult aesthetics to create a heightened experience. Sometimes that can help you commit to the process and get more out of it. (And other times con artists use it to get you to let your guard down, c'est la vie.)
Personally it's not for me, but when I got to know people who were into it, and did some readings to humor them, it made sense to me.
Yes and even among hackers. Porting doom to a microwave oven for instance.
Hugo Pratt, author of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corto_Maltese - hinted at this in one of stories about the character. Allegedly Corto met some sort of Gypsy palm reader when he was just a teen. The Gypsy checked his palm and told him his life line was short, so he would die very young. His reaction: he took out a knife and cut his own palm to make the line longer.
The latter part is usually missing when you use Tarot, Astrology etc.
There is also a desire to know "what will happen to me", but I think that divinatory magic can help even if you are 100% rational: http://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html
To the kind of person who wants to find a proximate cause for everything, "I didn't get the job because Jupiter is in Scorpio" is much less toxic than "I didn't get the job because the hiring committee is racist".
You are completely ignoring the primary motivation of both practices which is very much in attempting to understand yourself.
It's a shame when those who decry alternative systems do so using flawed logic.
What I am trying to say is that most people will not dig further and most importantly will not even try to put some honest work in trying to understand things in order to try to repair these.
And assuming I am right, Astrology is not really helping much, because if you are "stubborn because you are a Taurus or whatever" what are you supposed to do? What kind of corrective practices will Astrology suggest?
Please enlighten me (I am not sarcastic): in all my dealings with people who were interested in Astrology (interested beyond the most superficial interest) everybody was trying to "understand", a minority was trying to "predict". But nobody had any Astrology-based best practice to "heal" or "repair".
These can't both be true. Being in a PhD program is not a sign of intelligence. Belief in astrology is a clear sign of lack of intelligence.
Alchemy had not yet been debunked; astrology has.