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It is not, in any way, reasonable.
What definitely has an impact is, in what season you were born(if there are seasons). Whether your first steps outside are in snow, or in warm sun. That has an effect on development.
Still, I always loved Astronomy and could never understand the appeal of Astrology in the first place. It never made the slightest sense. So if I am born on day X, I am supposed to have trait A, but if I would be born some hours later I should be personality Y? (besides the fact, that the baby was alive and conscious before the birth). The reason why people take it serious, is probably to find guidance in a chaotic world and they seem to think some guidance is better than none (but I rather have no guiding, than one that makes no sense to me in the first place).
You're talking absolute micro-units of G force difference. Within a margin of error of most sensors. Orders of magnitude lower than we can detect as humans physically.
And even if we were not, how is there an obvious correlation between these two?
This is the exact sort of pseudo-scientific nonsense that's being spewed everywhere these days.
Instead of insulting, you could have also quoted my complete statement:
"But whether it affects us in any meaningful way, is doubtful, since the force is really, really small."
"And even if we were not, how is there an obvious correlation between these two?"
Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect?
A small change here, can lead to a big outcome there.
Change a brain cell here and a neuron there and who knows what happens in the long run.
But like I said, the forces in this case are really, really small.
This is simply an appeal to ignorance, who knows indeed. But that does not mean "anything in possible".
Do you rule out, that this process is influenced by gravity?
> Just that there is influence.
Wait, what? There's no effect at all, just influence? You're talking in circles.
And maybe I used 2 different terms to emphasize, that I do not claim that there is a significant change in the brain because of that influence. But a force is influencing, even though it is very small and below of what you can usually meassure. You can still calculate it if you want and extrapolate the meaning, if you are capable:
F = G x m1 x m2/(d²)
"Where G is the universal gravitational constant (meaning it has the same value throughout the universe), m1 and m2 are the masses of the objects in kilograms, and d is the distance between them in meters"
Spoiler alert, the result will be really, really small, but not zero. And none of this will proof claims of astrology, in case you got that mixed up.
To reiterate: the base of my argumentation is -
gravity: every object with mass influences EVERY other object with mass
butterfly effect: small changes in complex systems can lead to great outcome
The particles in the brain have mass and are a complex system.
So if you declare my argumentation is unscientific, it would probably help your case to show where exactly.
Only way I could see it.
As a simple test: ask N self-proclaimed astrology experts to guess your sign, and perhaps the signs of some others around you. Run a Chi-squared on the results. Come to your own conclusions.
Alternatively, plot some user data against birth month. Observe dependence.
IIUC, the idea behind Feng Shui (traditional Chinese interior design) is that if your furniture is arranged in a logical way, it has a positive mental impact and is therefore conducive to allowing you to thrive. On the other hand, if your furniture is incoherently arranged, it can lead to frustration and clutter, which have a negative mental impact.
I don’t think there are any studies on this, but at least intuitively, it seems to make sense to me.
Example: if you put your desk directly in front of your door, it’s in the way and therefore will be an (unconscious) source of frustration every time you enter the room (because you have to walk around it all the time). In Feng Shui this is described as the desk blocking the ‘energy’ of the door; I find it useful to think of ‘energy’ as a synonym for ‘traffic flow’ in this context.
If you want to know more about this, check out the excellent YouTube/TikTok channel ‘Dear Modern’, especially his short-form videos. (no affiliation)
That’s an incomplete description. Traditional Feng Shui says if your furniture is incoherently arranged, it disrupts the flow of Qi, and causes spirits to grant you ill fortune. Which sounds less plausible
I really recommend watching the following video, which introduces Feng Shui principles in a non-superstitious way:
“Feng Shui does make sense! The basis of how to plan your home for comfort and practicality” (runtime 6 min 34 sec) — https://youtube.com/watch?v=YsBPqO3pv_Y
If you ask me, nothing could be more "complete bunk" than some "scientist" claiming they've somehow blinded someone to their own birthday.
You don't blind people to their own birthdays, you mix real astrological predictions and readings with randomized ones, and see if the results fared better than random chance. I'm very skeptical of astrology (to be completely honest, I completely reject it), but I am trying to take part in a real conversation here. I believe that astrology is complete bunk, wall to wall, but I'm open to reading more on it and talking to you about it. I don't want to attack anybody for their beliefs.
I originally was like you and thought the answer was "no, my birthday says nearly nothing about me". However, over the past few years I've made a point to ask all new strangers I meet ("met at a bar" type folks who I had 0 prior connection to, so excluding friends of friends/etc.) who display an interest in astrology to guess my sign and state their astrological confidence. Roughly 85% folks who are "very confident" in their knowledge of astrology correctly guess it first try, often with little to no hesitation (N = ~8). The folks who are not as confident vary: some will also get it first try, some will take a couple, some give up after like 6.
For that experiment to be fair, you'd have to interact with them, and then they would have to write their guess and confidence down without you knowing what they're writing, and then afterward you'd have to collate the information.
This is the common thread that I've always seen, as someone who used to be very interested in the paranormal and supernatural. When you actually start measuring things properly and controlling for biases, the supernatural mysteriously disappears. It's only there when it can't be proven. Human imagination is extremely powerful. Remember the story of Clever Hans. Everybody, including the trainer, believed the horse could do math: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
This story comes into my head whenever I see psychics and readers of anything like this. Nobody is lying. Everybody believes it, even when it's not real. You can read body language and pick up on things without even understanding how. It's interesting, because you seem to be the opposite of me. I started out open to much of what I now consider hoodoo, and became a naturalist and a skeptic through my experiences. You had the reverse path. I suspect the answer may lay closer to the middle than either side, but I'll keep with what can be objectively shown in well-controlled tests.
There's really nothing not "fair" about it, but folks like you are so perverse to the idea of anything that doesn't fit your perception of the "scientific consensus" that you'll make up hoops in the name of "bias" to throw out every experimental result that doesn't agree with your preconceived notions up until the point all you have left are those experiments that you didn't see fit to invent hoops for because they already matched what you think you know. It's honestly terribly ironic, when you take the time to examine it.
I really do hope you can take the time to try this yourself and see for yourself what your own personal results are, there's no use at all for me to waste my time debating my own personal experience with someone so hell-bent on discrediting it on the basis of "actually I once read a paper that said..." and "well actually I know X Y Z errors with your experimental setup that you've told me next to nothing about and I never was able to even observe..."
If I try it myself, it'll be done right, and I won't keep the stats in my head. I know how fallible my own perception is, and as somebody with an anxiety disorder, I know how easy it is to read patterns out of thin air. For some people, reading patterns that don't exist seems mystical or illuminating, for me, it's a sense of constant unease and fear. I can't be universally open to just accepting things, or reading patterns with my intuition, because my intuition is that everything is potentially poisonous and I'm definitely going to die in less than a week.
Edit: You could have mentioned that you have a mental condition characterized by an irrational fear of pattern recognition in your diatribe about biases. I'd have known not to waste my time.
That's rude.
How about your data? Like I said before, I'd be happy to see the data. You've thrown some numbers off the top of your head, but I'd rather see the raw gathered data.
> I didn't say "seeing things that aren't there" either. I said reading more into things than are there and seeing patterns where they don't exist.
Ha.
And it's not an ad hominum when the trait is something directly related to the topic at hand.
The only saving grace of this simulation that I can see is how absolutely hilarious it is, it's like living in one of those old British sitcoms.
It's not even absolutely clear that Jesus was a historical personage.
It is pretty certain that Jesus was historically a personage, since we have historical evidence that people had a text (often called The Holy Bible, or some variation) with a character in it called Jesus.
There's also lots of evidence that Jesus was a historical person. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus for an introduction.
> Only two accepted facts of a historical Jesus Main article: Historical Jesus Part of the ancient Madaba Map showing two possible baptism locations Bronzino's depiction of the Crucifixion with three nails, no ropes, and a hypopodium standing support, c. 1545
> There is no scholarly consensus concerning most elements of Jesus's life as described in the Christian and non-Christian sources, and the only two events of this historical Jesus subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate (who officiated 26–36 AD).[14][4][5][6][7][note 5] The criterion of embarrassment has been used to argue for the historicity of the baptism of Jesus, shown here in The Baptism of Christ by Juan Fernández Navarrete.
> Based on the criterion of embarrassment, scholars argue that the early Christian Church would not have invented the painful death of their leader.[15] The criterion of embarrassment is also used to argue in favor of the historicity of the baptism of Jesus,[16][17][18] given that John baptised for the remission of sins, although Jesus was viewed as without sin and this positioned John above Jesus
Neither is even a kind of good argument. In place of actual evidence we are making impossible to disprove psychological arguments to the motivation of believers.
There is no contemporary as in at the time evidence of Jesus or reason to believe that the parties that wrote down accounts long after his death were actually recordings of first person accounts.
If the bible can make up exodus and fabricate Noah I have no reason to believe fabricating Jesus is beyond the pale. Here is what I think a better write up looks like it is admittedly biased
https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/did-jesus-exist/
Another reasonable challenge to the use of something like the Bible is that normally when a work contains thousands of clear fabrications and myths it tends to diminish its worth as a source.
For instance if I wrote a biography of wizzwizz4 and in the course of my writings claimed you were a godlike being from pluto who came to earth in the middle ages it would not only be dubious it would cast doubt on myself as a credible source. Even true things I wrote which were not corroborated elsewhere would be reasonably deemed dubious.
From a historian's perspective, these are completely different sources, from hundreds of years apart. There has been a lot of analysis of their composition, which tell us what we probably can and probably can't trust about them. You don't discard a historical source just because it's a religious text. There are no absolutely trustworthy sources in history, but that they existed within a context, giving us some confidence in certain properties at least.
Of Pythagoras, it has been written:
> There is not a single detail in the life of Pythagoras that stands uncontradicted. — Walter Burkert (via Wikipedia)
Aristotle is only attested in other people's writings, produced after his death. We still think he existed. All evidence of Diotíma of Mantinea can be traced back to Plato's Symposium, where a handful of her ideas were recorded. Plato might have made her up, but there's reason to believe he didn't. We only have, like, four sources on Genghis Khan's life, and he was viewed as a deity for hundreds of years. Nonetheless, we're pretty sure there was a person called Genghis Khan who existed, and held the role in society that all these tales suggest he did (even if the tales themselves may not be true).
Very little is known about almost everyone. Jesus is not exceptional in this regard. If you say that Jesus didn't exist because there's not good evidence, you have to discard a lot of allegedly-historical figures for the same reason. (Or, I suppose, just make a special exception for this one guy.)
We accept that our bodies are mostly water
But the idea that the position of the moon or planets affects us is insane
(There have been several small-N studies looking at various folk beliefs about higher incidences of certain events during full moons, but I don't believe any of the studies found a significant correlation)
Same thing on the other side - the water is 6300 KM further away from the moon than is the (center of) the earth. So it is pulled less strongly, and thus to an observer on the earth it looks like that water is being pulled away.
So, hypothetically, if our blood or CSF had a different mass-slash-density than our bones, and our skulls were further from the earth's surface than the rest of our bodies, they could conceivably be pulled more-or-less strongly than the rest of it?
Not even remotely reasonable in any capacity.