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Comment by 6510 | Hacker News Reader

on the lunatic bin that is sci.physics on usenet there one time was a cooperative effort making a list of topics (in any field) forbidden to research. I much regret not saving a copy. It was insanely long.

I want to say most of it was wrong but who am I to judge? One could say it was all wrong, it was the whole point of the exercise.

The discussion pretended everything was astrology. What is there to fear from researching the relationship between peoples personality and the position of the stars at their birth? Does it enrage you? What if they find something? Would you deny it foaming from the mouth? Based on what?

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> What is there to fear from researching the relationship between peoples personality and the position of the stars at their birth

That's not the core belief of astrology.

There very likely are correlations between personality and the season (or even month) of their birth, which for a given hemisphere will correlate strongly to stellar positions. Regular science would not be surprised to discover that (and maybe already has).

Astrology goes way beyond that, because it is fundamentally predicated on the idea that there is a causal link between stellar arrangement and personality, despite no mechanism being proposed, and despite the problem that the correlations in real life appear exceedingly weak (especially when considering northern/southern hemisphere issues.

There are volumes written on these topics (many of them a long time ago), but they bring up a lot of existential questions about - in this case in particular - free will, which quickly spreads to the more philosophical theologians and lawyers.

Scientists of the simpler sort (or who have a position to lose) tend to dismiss the implications of these big, controversial questions and put their heads down in the equations.

Astrology I would mostly be sad at the money and effort wasted. Also I would expect the research would be bad and claim positive results that were wrong but popular media would spread it and the world would become a little dumber. Which does have consequences, it isn't harmless.

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