That’s neutron density Virgo!
Wow, thank you for clearing that up and debunking every questionable thing in this world. I get it now - everything in this world that happens there is a definate and logical explaination and if I dont believe in the reasoning provided and supported by the majority, and question it to every degree - I am in the wrong because of so-called concrete evidence. Thank goodness I kept the stake & lumber mound out back so not to inconvieniance the neighbors when they decide to burn me if I do not turn into a sheep soon enough.
Astrology is not set in stone/one divine intrepretation and that’s where man travels down the wrong path and gets himself into trouble. There are things in this world that cannot be explained in black and white. We are human. There is room for error. And I have experienced way too many things that science and a majority of the population tell me that it’s not possible or there is some logical explanation. You see, there will always continue to be those who try to debunk the other’s belief and neither one will have 100% tried and true evidence for everything.
What’s the difference between an astrologer and astronomer? An Astrologer is an interpreter of celestial phenomena, while an Astronomer is a predictor of celestial phenomena.
Unh…“the stars impell, not compell?”
The ones that match the theory prove the theory. The ones that do not are anomolies. Horoscopists can never lose because the theory has been used for thousands of years.
Just in case… :rolleyes:
No, he’s smarter than that, he wouldn’t make the argument that because we don’t currently have empirical evidence of a thing, that thing does not exist.
But demanding statistical analysis without any possibility of obtaining the data ain’t quite kosher. Tell you what, slip me a grant of $100 million and a staff of a couple thousand, give me about 20 years and I’ll see what I can do.
I don’t think that’s the argument he was making…I think the request for statistical data was a way of illustrating that all we have as evidence in this situation are anecdotes. I could see him making a very similar argument regarding, say, wether or not prayer works. I could give a whole bunch of anecdotes regarding my grandmother and her rosary, and he could easily ask me the same thing…do I have any data that shows that the people who Grandma prayed for had more of a statistical propensity for “miracles” than people who didn’t get prayed for? I doubt seriously that I would have any way of coming up with that data. And guess what? Diogenes would be equally unimpressed with my “evidence” as he is with WhyNot’s.
But if you can’t show any evidence that Virgos are more organized than non Virgos, how can you say that Virgos are more organized than non Virgos.
And when you say that the sun sign is only one part of it, and that they grade into each other, and there are lots of other factors, I’m perfectly willing to accept that. I don’t think many astrology believers think each and every Virgo is always organized.
What I’m looking for are simple correlations that are statistically different than change for various personality traits.
And this isn’t exactly a difficult test to do. Anyone with a database of Myers-Briggs personality test results (Myers–Briggs Type Indicator - Wikipedia) with attached date of birth information could see if any such correlations existed. Generate the sun signs from DOB and then look to see which personality traits if any are correlated with sun sign.
Of course, and this is where it gets tricky, such correlations are guaranteed to exist. If you look at 20 correlations, and your cutoff for statistical significance is .05, by chance you would expect to find one statistically significant correlation. Just like when you flip coins you’re very likely to see a couple runs of heads or runs of tails, any particular run of heads is very unlikely but if you look at a long history it is very likely that such runs happened, in fact if you don’t find them then you’ve got evidence that your coin flips are not random.
So to make a more useful test, you’ve got to choose in advance the Myers-Briggs results that you expect to see overrepresented for each sun sign. You could decide that your anecdotal evidence suggests that Virgos are Introverted-Sensing-Thinking-Judging, Tauruses are Extroverted-iNtuitive-Feeling-Judging, or whatever. And then see if in fact a larger percentage of Virgos fit that profile than non-Virgos.
Or any such personality test. And if we find that sun sign has no correlation with personality test results, what have we found? That it is impossible to predict someone’s personality better than chance if you only know their sun sign.
And each and every claim of astrology can be tested this way. Of course, the reason people sometimes say that astrology can’t be tested is because, when you do tests like this, you don’t find significant results. So therefore the problem isn’t that astrology doesn’t work, the problem is that science is only, like, your opinion, man.
I’ve studied a bit of the occult over the years. The purpose was not to determine my path in life–but to help in understanding myth, legend, psychology (Jung!) & art. Perhaps some people call up their astrologers before they get out of bed in the morning. I don’t even have one–although a friend did my chart many years ago. Astrology can be an interesting & elegant game. I like Rob Brezsny’s approach.
As I begin my day–I check the weather!
(Eventually, I realized the I Ching kept telling me to Grow Up! Some Tarot sets are, indeed, beautiful.)
Don’t you mean that you don’t find significant correlations, not results? A lack of correlations can be quite significant. It means that astrology is hogwash.
I agree. Said exactly that. Never implied otherwise, in fact, explicitly stated that my opinion is based entirely and exclusively on my own experience. Period. Full stop.
As I said upstream, its unfortunate that this is a GD, because no meaningful debate is possible. Someone has a polite question, I am happy to offer a truthful answer. But I’ve been down this road way too many times, and being sneered upon gets on my nerves. Ain’t worth it. Believe what you will.
Want to debate the vile perfidy of the Green Bay Packers, well, that’s different…
I know you did. But Diogenes was responding to WhyNot (not you), and you took issue with his objection to her evidence.
Kind of funny, coming from one of the all-time SDMB Champion Sneerers! 
But I agree. This is why I don’t tend to get involved with religious debates around here. What can you say if you can’t give a cite from, you know, Wikipedia or some other respectable source?
They are pure evil. No debate there.
To be fair, it doesn’t prove that astrology is hogwash, it only proves that the particular theory of astrology you’re testing is hogwash. Proving that drug A doesn’t relieve eczema doesn’t mean that nothing can relieve eczema, or that drug A is worthless, it just proves that drug A doesn’t relieve eczema.
Now, the trouble is that there are an infinite number of potential theories about the world, and going about disproving each one is impossible. We can try every known substance in the world to see if it relieves eczema but there are millions of substances so it’s impossible to test them all. So anecdotal evidence is hightly useful in proposing candidates for testing.
So there is a widely believed theory that certain sun signs tend to have certain personality traits. This is anecdotal evidence, but testing the theory for each proposed correlation isn’t difficult. And finding that each proposed correlation does not exist is good evidence, but it doesn’t prove that no such correlations are possible. Maybe we should look for the position of Mars. Or Pluto. Or Xena, or Shoemaker-Levy, or whatever.
But of course we have no good reason to suspect that the position of some ball of ice that no one ever heard of has an effect on personality. And of course, we also have no good reason to suspect that the position of the sun has any such effect either, it’s just that for historical reasons lots of people really DO believe it, so proving that their wrong is helpful. This doesn’t disprove each and every theory of astrology, just like proving that there are no invisible goblins in my cellar doesn’t prove that there are no invisible pixies in my attic. But if we take a look first for invisible pixies, then invisible goblins, then invisble gnomes, then invisible boggarts, and each time we find nothing, it seems to me that eventually we will become less and less hopefull that the next time we investigate will turn up something interesting. Just because the sun rose today and rose yesterday and the day before that doesn’t prove the sun is going to rise tomorrow, it just means that’s the way to bet, and if someone tells you that unless we cut out the hearts of a thousand prisoners the sun is not going to rise tomorrow, you should probably not believe them.
And just in case anyone didn’t understand my point about the runs of heads and tails, suppose we take a history of 10 coin flips, and it’s HTHHHTHTHT. Looks unremarkable, right? But suppose we asked, what were the odds that we’d get HTHHHTHTHT? Well, 1 in 2^10, or 1 in 1024. Wow! That particular run of heads and tails is pretty unlikely. But every specified run of heads or tails is equally unlikely, the trouble is that we know that if we flip a coin ten times we’re going to get some history of results. We were just as unlikely to get HTHHHTHTHT as we were to get HHHHHHHHHH. So if we flip our coins and then look for unlikely results, we’re guaranteed to find them because every result is as unlikely as any other. It’s easy for our human brains to see that HHHHHHHHHH is unlikely, but it’s hard for us to understand that HTHHHTHTHT is equally unlikely.
So similarly, if we hypothesize that Virgos are more likely to be INFP on Myers-Briggs, and then we check and discover that they are indeed more often INFP, then we’ve found something interesting. But if we look at Virgos and try to find if they are more or less likely to have a particular personality profile, and then find that it turns out that Virgos are more likely to be ISTP, then we haven’t discovered anything interesting, because if we look hard enough we are guaranteed to find statistically unlikely events. If our confidence level is .05, and we test 20 traits, we’re likely to find one correlation even with random data.
Good point.
All is forgiven.
Polite question: From what I can tell glancing at wiki, there are no less than three distinctly different ways of calculating horoscopes. Do all these methods yield the same results, or at least results that agree with one another?
Some idiot columnist in the Chicago Tribune wrote a bit today about why he thinks we should root for them this weekend. Cancel my subscription!
Like WhyNot, I am a dabbler, not a pro, but I’ll throw in my two cents.
To begin with, I do not believe that heavenly bodies exert some kind of influence on us, so let’s get that out of the way.
While I think that the ancient people who developed the system over long years of observation made a fundamental error about causality, I do think they made a pretty neat picture of the human psyche - largely because that’s what they were actually observing, and also what they were using to observe it. The house systems and the planetary symbology (astrologers use “planets” as a metonym for “planets and luminaries and anything else we find up there that looks fun to play with”) represent universal areas and attributes of the human race.
Second, I think that because they were trying to match up things they observed in the sky with things they observed in people around them (due to their erroneous assumption about causality) they found some correlations with the natural cycles of human development. For example, WhyNot mentioned the Saturn return. Saturn runs on a 7-14-28 year cycle, and those happen to be close to certain biologically and/or culturally significant developmental stages in a person’s life. LIkewise, there’s some evidence that children born in the dead of winter are affected by the lack of sunlight - hence the Capricorns’ reputation for dourness and depression (hm, I and my two Cap brothers are the ones in our family who are certified, card-carrying, medicated depressives. The Sagittarius and the Aries, not so much.). So they went “Ah ha! We found something!” And they had; it just wasn’t what they thought it was. But it still tends to match. (Mind you, some stuff matches, some stuff doesn’t. Some is shoehorned till it fits, some is coincidental, some has some basis in genuine cycles, IMO.)
Another thing is the element of “expression” or choice. Every symbol of placement, aspect or planet has multiple expressions of its attributes. Two putative people with identical charts, in addition to having different environments, will each have the ability to choose how to express that chart. Do you use your “Mars in Scorpio in the 10th” (which could be translated as “professional activity that uncovers the unknown”) to be an underhanded muckraking journalist or a medical researcher who discovers the cure for cancer? (Damn Cancers, somebody needs to do something about those people!) So it may be ambiguity that gives such flexibility or it may be personal choice. And one choice leads to the next and the next and so on, until you have built very different paths from the same raw material, so to speak.
Because, yeah, there is a lot of ambiguity in astrology. It’s not a science, in spite of its observational roots, misguided as they were. It’s an art, an entertainment (maybe we should be in Cafe Society). But in my view, it also has meaning. It doesn’t get it from “the stars”, it gets it from us, the makers of meaning. I find it to be a tidy and attractive template for constructing a personal mythology. It’s fun to play with.
So is that “belief”? I don’t know.
:eek:
*runs and hides quickly in her crab-shell “HOME” & yells out:
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me!”
Ooops! wrong one… :smack:
I would have a lot more respect for astrology if it was typically presented in this way. Psychology is an inexact science compared to something like physics, but humans are all biologically the same and our brains are wired the same, so there are going to be patterns. Finding patterns in personalities correlating with the time of year one is born is an interesting study, one that’s not going to be correct every time, but still may have some explanatory power. When these patterns are attributed to planets and stars and magic pixies or whatever, that’s when my eyes glaze over and I no longer care to listen.
Nobody likes being sneered at (except maybe Andy Kaufman, and by all accounts he’s dead), but perhaps you can understand the reflexive disbelief: as though someone you’ve known for some time, who appears in every other way intelligent, sane, and rational, announces a fervent belief that the reason birds are able to fly through the air is because they’re suspended from the clouds on tiny invisible wires. Your instinctive reaction is to object, and attempt to describe air currents, lift… “No. Invisible wires.” So you point out the logistical problems… what would the wires even be attached to, and who or what… “Nope. WIRES. I don’t know how it works, but I know that’s how it’s done, and if you don’t agree, you can go pound sand for all I care.”
Well, okay. Birds on wires. Whether or not meaningful debate is possible, it certainly appears unnecessary at this point; the answer to the OP’s question is obviously yes.
What’s the matter, don’t you want to be… cured?
(Sorry, bad experience with old boyfriend. Mars in Scorpio can be vindictive.)
Very disorganized(from a thread a few weeks ago- a class 2-3 clutterer in fact) and admittedly, often flaky, not too typical Virgo here. Nice to meet y’all. Though at the same time I am also very analytical, too often serious, shy, and way too nice for my own damn good. Call it a draw?
Well, off to get some coffee, it’s feeling a bit cold in here while reading this thread.