To be fair though, most doctors don't perform much better than these astrologers in my experience, and that's with billions of dollars in research, a quarter of a million dollar education and years of rigorous training. It turns out most people are incompetent and our science is worse than we think in a lot of cases.
Citation needed. Even agreement between the astrologers was low, which is a strong argument that it doesn't work even if you believe in it. That is, the patterns "predicted" by astrology simply do not exist; individuals cannot reliably reinforce their behavior based on expected behavior because there is no agreement on what the expected behavior is.
> most doctors don't perform much better than these astrologers in my experience
I mean, we've all had bad experiences with doctors, but this is comparing apples to wooden spheres painted red. I have had doctors successfully treat patients many times, including such things as prescribing antibiotics and succesfully delivering children.
https://medium.com/doctoryak/challenging-sciences-status-quo...
“There was interest and support from a few but most of my work was rejected for publication and even accepted papers were significantly delayed. I was met with constant criticism that my conclusions were premature and not well supported. When the work was presented, my results were disputed and disbelieved, not on the basis of science but because they simply could not be true. It was often said that no one was able to replicate my results. This was untrue but became part of the folklore of the period. I was told that the bacteria were either contaminants or harmless commensals”.
In a different thread we could have a nuanced discussion of both the theory and practice of medicine. But the very worst view of modern medicine is so far ahead of astrology that it isn't even a meaningful comparison.
Doctors throw shit at the walls pretty hard, the difference is that when they get lucky it's obvious, and when they don't, they have malpractice insurance.
In the ten minutes he was gone, they looked up his sign and his girlfriend decided they were not compatible and literally dumped him when he got back. I guess with the lens of time, maybe there was more going on, but at the time it seemed like this was solely based on the advice of the astrology website. I was flabbergasted and have had a very negative opinion on astrology ever since.
That's key here though -- even experts disagree on what conformance to a sign means. So someone who makes life decisions like "I'm not going to go on a second date with this person; as an Aquarius there's no way I can ever love someone born in the second house of Cancer" or some shit is creating a rationalization -- presented with the same facts another astrologer might reach completely different conclusions.
So they're not really "conforming" to anything at all -- they're just "making decisions" like the rest of us.
EDIT: to further clarify, the claim that "astrology works on people who believe in it" is really saying "people who believe in astrology and conform their actions to it are predictable in their reactions using astrology". The inter-expert agreement is low enough that even true believers in astrology are not predictable using astrology because two experts would predict different behavior.