Hacker News Reader

Comment by i80and | Hacker News Reader

Obviously astrology does no better than random guessing, that's no surprise. But the fact that astrology had such low levels of agreement is a little interesting to me -- I guess I assumed there was some kind of underlying system to astrology, but I guess not!

> Much to my surprise, astrologers had very low agreement with each other on the chart for each person. If astrologers picked charts at random, they would agree with each other 20% of the time. In our study, even the most experienced astrologers only agreed 28% of the time.

View on HN

> Obviously astrology does no better than random guessing

Not necessarily. It is entirely plausible that babies born during the Summer months share something in common, and babies born during Winter months share something else. Since astrological signs are 100% correlated with the seasons, one could "guess" with a higher probability than random chance these traits. The causality would obviously not be from stars to babies, but from seasons to babies, but an observational study could end up "proving" that astrology works by identifying these "predictions".

This study was a followup to one that just used signs [1], which yielded performance no better than chance. If the summer/winter correlation held, then that study would have shown positive results, which it did not.

There's nothing to say that these star charts or seasons of birth cannot correlate with personality traits or life outcomes. But Astrology, as a practice, is not useful for unwinding those correlations. If you have some alternate system, feel free to propose it -- pump the star charts and personality charts from this study into some AI and see if it can come up with some kind of super-astrology, and then try to replicate it.

I doubt you'd find anything stronger than predicting the answer to the question "were you born in the summer or the winter".

[1] https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/we-tested-the-predictiv...

Also, summer in one half of the world is winter in the other, so the signs do not correlate 100% with seasons, and you'd have to study across geographies.

I predict: people will be warning warm jackets on your birthday

> It is entirely plausible that babies born during the Summer months share something in common, and babies born during Winter months share something else.

This would not account for reversal of the seasons in opposite hemispheres...

... or do the northern and southern hemispheres practice a different "western" astrology (!).

90% of humans live in the northern hemisphere, it would still be strongly predictive if true.

Or ever more local differences like when school age cut off is. I would expect some small differences be found due to these impacts, but they would not be universally applicable without generalization.

If schools roll over to the next grade at the start of October, babies born in October will perform better due to being the oldest in their class, but this would not be universal. What I would expect to be universal, is given a school system that does grade division in this way, students right after the division would do better than the ones born right before, as the first group is the oldest in their class and the second group is the youngest.

The extent this pairs with astrology would probably depend purely on population densities between different cultures. If things were fully uniform it would average out, but given they aren't, some residual bias existing wouldn't surprise me.

To give a concrete example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_age_effect

But whether astrology actually settled on these features would depend on the feedback systems in place, and the granularity of those systems/how predictions were made in reference to a specific person.

There are several different astrology systems in use that draw on various world spiritual/astrological traditions, make different astronomical assumptions and adjustments, etc.

There are also lots of different things that could factor into a birth chart reading, so different astrologers might put more emphasis on different aspects.

Fun stuff, and not entirely valueless as an exercise in self-reflection.

The low agreement may be accounted for by the degree to which each astrologer adjusts for changes in planetary alignments (or whatever) since astrology was first established as a discipline. In other words, birth month for a particular astrological sign is different now than it would have been 2000 years ago.

Modern Astrology was established by Ptolemy who standardized on the Tropical Zodiac in the 2nd Century AD. In that system, the Sun always moves from Pisces to Aires on the Vernal Equinox. This was a more precise definition of what the ancient Babylonians did (defining the Zodiac based on 30 degree divisions of the Ecliptic).

I'm not arguing that Astrology is scientific, but I am saying it's precise, to the limits of the measurement technology of the time period in which it was defined.

Traditional astrology has an extremely sophisticated system underneath. Modern astrology, not so much.

It is my understanding that ancient astrology was basically proto-astronomy, similar to how alchemy was the forerunner of chemistry/advanced metallurgy. A lot of woo, but the ‘art’ still had enough systematized concepts and early discoveries that it offered some limited scientific scaffolding.

This is true.

The sophisticated system I'm speaking of however is not the astronomical science (though indeed they were responsible for this development, and it was of course sophisticated) but rather a methodical, extensive, rules-based study of fate, as related to platonic (archetypal) forms.

It depends on which "modern" astrology you have in mind. For example the "Shamanic Astrology" system by Daniel Giamario is the product of a lot of thought, effort, and research.

Obviously disease is caused by a dwarf residing in the belly.

An angry dwarf.

Kary Mullis (nobel laureate for discovering PCR, allowing DNA sequencing) disagrees in his book “dancing naked in the mindfield”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

Many scientists hold religious beliefs, I don't see the difference here?

Fluorescent talking alien raccoons! Wow, some hallucinogen.

Maybe it is just too early in the morning for me, but Kary Mullis disagrees with what in particular? That astrologers disagree with each other? That astrology does no better than random guessing?

The wiki link has a single line, saying that he believed in astrology, but that's it. I'm struggling to see what point you intended with your comment.

He's a great example of why being an expert in a specific thing does not make you an expert in all things.

Kind of you to link the Wiki page as the full sentence that mentions Mullis' astrology belief is: "Mullis professed a belief in astrology and wrote about an encounter with a fluorescent, talking raccoon that he suggested might have been an extraterrestrial alien."

This is the kind of statement that the Appeal to Authority fallacy was made for. Just because someone is an expert in one field doesn't mean their opinions matter in every field.

All this points to is the danger of believing someone based on reputation rather than evidence.

Empirical evidence is the basis of science, not reputation. No one, no matter what they've done before, gets to present their hypotheses as fact without evidence.

One problem that outsiders to a field have is that we may lack the background knowledge to evaluate the evidence for a hypothesis. In that case, I try to rely on consensus rather than one expert opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com