No. The phenomen is the correlation between personality and time of birth. Look, I don’t believe this stuff either, but let’s be fair about what the issue is here.
I don’t know what defines Libra vs. Virgo. The point is that the astrologer had to look it up using a reference to the contempory alignment of the stars, sun, planets, etc. That entire anecdote was there to question your claim that astrologers use charts from eons past.
I’ll just throw this out as food for thought: People born in January and February have a higher chance of being schizophrenic.
I don’t have a cite for that, but let’s take it at face value for now.
All people? No, just those born in the higher lattitudes of the Northern hemisphere. Just those two months? No, all of the colder months.
From this we can surmise that schizophrenia is somehow either tied to light, or to warmth which is attributable to light. In this sense, one could say that personality is tied to time of birth, place of birth, and the position of at least one star.
Here is one, that describes an experiment published in Nature. A number of astrologers were given three personality profiles for each birth date, one of a person with that date and two phonies. The astrologers were not allowed to meet the real people. Their results were no better than chance.
This one has a whole bunch of references to experiments.
The shift of the Zodiac over time is now well known. It doesn’t surprise me a bit that some astrologers are taking this into account. How this could possibly affect anything is a different matter.
The experiment proposed by the OP is inherently flawed. You can’t just throw stuff up into the air and see what sticks on the ceiling - you must start with a hypothesis and test it. As mentioned before, there will be a correlation with something - which won’t be there when the experiment is repeated, no doubt. If astrologers are predicting anything useful (and they claim they do) there should be not problem producing hypotheses to test - and in fact they have been tested and no evidence supporting them has been found.
If you want to read up on one of the more famous/notorious studies of astrology, do a search on “Gauquelin,” a French researcher who claimed to have found strong correlations between birth signs and sports achievement, among other things. The debates over his methods and findings have been going on for years.
Ultimately, however, the lack of a plausible mechanism, I believe, settles the question. For every possible explanation, there’s a very convincing counter:
[ul]
[li]Maybe it’s the light from the planets? The monitor in front of you subjects you to more light.[/li][li]Maybe it’s the gravitational effects of the planets? The monitor in front of you exerts a greater gravitational pull on your body than any planet does.[/li]Maybe it’s the magnetic fields of the planets? Your monitor, again… You get the picture![/ul]
Even that is flawed. All it is testing is whether astrologers are good at what they do, not whether astrology is real.
A better test would be to test random members of the population on a variety of subjects and see if there is a correlation between various personality traits and birth dates. If nothing can be found there, then all other tests are moot.
First of all, it is impossible to prove astrology wrong in general. You can only demonstrate that no one who claims they can practice astrology can do what they claim better than chance. If no astrologer in the world can successfully practice astrology, the question of whether astrology works or not is moot.
Second, remember that significance testing always involves determining the percentage of times the outcome might be attributed to chance, and is not real. If you test a limited sample for enough correlations, you are guaranteed to come up with something that looks significant. It means absolutely nothing. If you fire a machine gun at a target, some bullet will hit the bullseye - that doesn’t mean you are a sharpshooter. This is why you are not allowed to claim a correlation in experimental data you’ve collected that you were not looking for. You’ll see something interesting, (because there are so many possible correlations) but you can’t claim it until you do an experiment meant to determine of the correlation is real.
On a practical level, perhaps. But all you will really prove is that no one being tested is a skilled astrologer. It could very well be that astrology works, but there simply are no qualified practitioners.
In testing the general population, you could at least see if there is anything to go on, and leave out the variable of flawed individuals.
Of course. What you’d want to find are actual significant results. That goes without saying. If any are found, then you’d want to tighten your controls to see just how significant the results are.
Another point to such a study should to be clear on testing the two aspects of astrology. They are often muddled together in this pseudoscience, but they seem totally separate to me.
The first is the correlation of personality types with birth date, time, and location, using the celestial events in the sky of that precise time and place. The second is predicting events and trends in the world or in a person’s life based on the current celestial events.
While I don’t believe either could hold up, it seems much more likely that you’ll find a tiny effect in the first case than that you’ll find any form of accuracy in the second.
By the way, any one I’ve ever met that knows how to actually do astrology (casting charts and such) agrees with us in one thing: The horoscopes published in newspapers are useless, and they will say that they are not a part of ‘real’ astrology.
I have done an interesting test on astrology. It is very simple. Get a fairly large # of dudes together- up to 12- that knwo each other to a degree. Get a real well known book about astrology- by some expert. DO NOT DISCLOSE THIS IS A TEST, JUST “SOMETHING FUN TO DO”. Ask one of the group their sign. Read the “real” personality type: “as a virgo, you are curious, and sometimes impulsive…” for that person. Ask every one, as you go along, to grade how accurate that is- discuss. Most everyone will say “that fits so&so to a T”. OK, great.
Go to the next- assuming they are not the same “sign”-but read a 'wrong" one. Again- I’ll bet the same “accuracy”. Then the next, and so forth. Remember to read the same section for each sign, of course! They are couched in such language that they fit EVERYONE.
Note that I tried this with Myers/Briggs. If the “type” was “next” to the “real” type- we still have agreement that it is “right”. However, read one which is the opposite, and you have much shaking of heads and saying"no, that doesn’t sound like Sam at all". Thus although MB is not precisely accurate, it does have some validity.
Astrology fails this test completely. As does all the rest of that psuedoscience nonsense- Chinese astrology, etc.
Voyager- thanks for the cites. CSICOP has some good ones also.
I’ve actually wondered about the underlying premise of the OP, because I know someone who was born hours after me close by, isn’t at all related, and has lived a life somewhat similar to my own, i.e.:
Neither of us fit the stereotype of our alleged Sun sign, but the parallelism of our lives is interesting, from the POV of the astrology premise that if you’re born at the same time in the same place your lives and personalities will be similar.
I know, probably a coincidence, but…
it makes me wonder. (Sorry, LZ fans.)
As for the experiment described in the OP: make sure that the people administering the tests do not know what the birthdate is, or it will contaminate their examinations.
pantom, it would be remarkable if there weren’t some such correlations. I bet if you met someone also born near you in time and place who didn’t have any similarities with you, you wouldn’t think it remarkable and wouldn’t remember it and wouldn’t report it here.
It’s a self-selecting “co-incidence”.
Not really. You can simply test for the validity of an observation. Let’s say that someone notices that tall people make better grades than short people. It is perfectly legitimate science to put together an experiment to see if there is indeed a correlation between height and GPA. If such a correlation exists then you can start looking for hypotheses as to why the phenomenon exists. Maybe it’s because tall people have, in general, better nutrition. Maybe it’s because tall people get preferential treatment by their teachers. Maybe it’s because tall people’s brains are closer to the planetary gravitational forces. 
So testing for the existence of personality differences between populations based on birth date is perfectly legitimate science. If no differences are found then the experiment pretty much stops there; however, if there are differences then the next step would be to develop theories to explain the phenomenon. That’s where things get much trickier.
IIRC, the Gauquelin studies looked for astrological/personality correlations among a wide range of possibilities, basically a fishing expedition. About the only thing that he had success with was that some measure of sports achievement was related to some position of Mars. That was probably the result of the phenomenon that Voyager and other have mentioned that if you test for enough things, you’re bound to get some hits by accident – statistical artifacts I believe they’re called.
Nope. You don’t need to understand the mechanism behind a phenomenon for it to be true. Gravity existed long before we had any understanding of how it worked.
Well well well, I just got done teaching a course on “History of Astrology and History of Science” which ended with an examination of twentieth-century attempts to “validate” astrology scientifically, and within a month, up pops a GD thread on this very subject! Boy, am I prepared to make a contribution here!
Unfortunately, other posters have pretty much beaten me to everything I might have said. I would just point you to Jan Willem Nienhuys’s excellent recapitulation of the Gauquelin experiments and their aftermath.
As for current work in this field, you might be interested in the University of Southampton’s Research Group for the Critical Study of Astrology.
I think it would be very difficult to come up with any scientific test of astrology that would really provide clear, convincing results about astrology as a whole. For centuries, astrological practices have become more and more involved and complex, to attempt to account for the involved complexity of human life (and, I would skeptically suggest as a non-believer in astrology, to make falsification of their claims more difficult). I don’t think you could find an astrological hypothesis that’s both broad enough to be truly fundamental and specific enough to be adequately testable.
Well, there’s your problem right there: your willingness to add more complexity to the problem (by invoking biorythms) in order to support your theory (that astrology works).
I saw the same show you did, and in addition to testing a bunch of people with identical horoscopes, Randi also demonstrated a simulated occurance of “psychic surgery”. This practice involves the psychic apparantly forcing his bare hands into the abdomen of a patient, with appropriate blood-letting and whatnot, pulling out a tumour, then healing the wound so that when the blood is cleared away, there isn’t even a scar. Randi showed that he could put on an equally effective show using slight-of-hand and chicken guts for the gory effect. Did this prove all psychic surgery was fake? Of course not. It only proved that psychic powers were not necessary in order to look like you were performing psychic surgery.
Similarly, the horoscope demonstration didn’t prove horoscopes were bunk, it just proved that consulting the stars was not necessary in order to tell someone vague facts about his life and personality.
Given these demonstrations, when I see someone perfoming psychic surgery, I could assume some sort of extraordinary medical procedure was being done, or I could assume it was trickery. The latter is easier to believe, unless the psychic surgeon can show something that cannot be done by fakery, i.e. verifiable X-rays taken immediately before and after surgery showing that a tumour has in fact been removed.
Likewise, if someone gives me a horoscope that describes my life in some surprisingly accurate way, I could assume astrology is real, or I could assume that the description is a lucky guess and/or is so generalized that it could accurately describe lots of people. For me to accept astrology as real (or at least worth serious investigation) an astrologer would have to come up with something very specific that couldn’t have been derived by any other means. So far, I’ve not seen anything even close. Until such time, horoscopes go into my “bunk until proven otherwise” pile.
As long as you’re willing to accept increasingly complex and vague explanations for astrology’s failings, you’ll always be hoodwinked.
Your example is a legitimate experiment, since it begins with the hypothesis that tall people make better grades. One similar to that suggested in the OP is to collect data on grades and a dozen other characteristics. (height, weight, hair color, etc.) Then, when you find a correlation with one of these characteristics and grades, declare that you have found something useful.
If you do this, the real experiment begins when you test whatever you have found on another population. That would be okay, but practically speaking the chance of finding anything interesting in this methodology is so small that it is not cost effective to pursue.
I don’t believe personality trait tests are any more valid than astrologic readings. Skeptics, amateurs, and other tyros of various callings will never understand the loyalty of the believers.
Mainly because they are not willing to learn about the subject from professionals. They typically read an article or two, usually written by a skeptic who has also read an article or two, usually written by a skeptic.
No, I don’t think knowing where Venus was when you were born will in any way make predictions about your future. Neither will the Tarot cards or the Ouija board. That is not what is taking place. What is taking place I leave for you to learn.
I will say Astrology has the largest following of believers among the spiritual predictive devices. I have never used it, no need to, but I had a friend who was widely known as a great Astrologer. Unfortunately he predicted his own death and died on the day he predicted of a heart attack. No he didn’t do drugs or wasn’t sick. He was 40 years old. A great loss to me.
Love
Leroy
Suppose we maintain that nothing is taking place, beyond the normal outcomes of free will and random chance?
Aren’t there thousands of astrologers (I decline to capitalize the word) whose deaths come as an unwelcome surprise, like junk mail or that door-to-door saleman guy currently being flamed in the Pit?
I won’t bother linking to the thread. I leave its location as something for you to learn.