I never had any intention to sneer at you. I was asking someone else to provide empirical evidence to support a specific assertion. In my mind, I was asking a polite question. Don’t take it personally. I’m not passing judgement on anyone as a person just because they have one nutty belief. Who doesn’t?
Well there’s no debate there.
Since we seem to be picking on Virgos in this thread, I wonder if the resident astrologers would all agree to this list of Virgo characteristics from Wiki:
Probably trim out about half those adjectives, maybe more.
Maybe the way to word this is not that empirical evidence is impossible, but that it is exceedingly unlikely.
If every human being who has lived in the most recent ten thousand years (sample size, *very *important), and we could render those people into mathematical profiles of their character traits, etc. The Cthulu of databases. And the Pazuzu of processors, the Pentium Ten Thousand, with every molecule in Known Space as a byte in the computer that operates several orders of magnitude faster than light. No hamsters.
And we program that to filter for, say, aggressiveness and violence. We cross reference that to the birth dates. We throw out all marginals, all the samples of sun signs are from square in the middle of a given sign, furthest from contamination or moderation.
I would expect, as a* measurable* result, that the signs of Scorpio, Aries and Capricorn will markedly more prevalent than Pisces, Virgo or Libra. It would take a sample that big before the significance of the sun sign could manifest. But I think that it would.
So, I believe that we are talking about objective facts that lie outside of our capacity to confirm them on a scientific basis. It exists, but to seek the sort of empirical confirmation that makes science as powerful as it is, is so unlikely as to be practically impossible. Now, if the thing in question did not exist, it would be impossible to confirm. So: not impossible, just way difficult.
Does that mess with my rational mind-set? Hugh Betcha! Its anomalous as all get out, one of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn’t belong. It flies in the face of all the rationality I revere so fervently, it should *not *be.
But there it is. And I trust my own judgment and sanity quite completely, thank you very much. I am willing to accept the anomaly without any likelihood I will ever figure out how it happens. It differs from faith to the extent that I believe it could be explained if I were just a fuck of a lot smarter.
But if we had the means to test it, and the correct metric to measure by, we could measure it. Because it exists.
How the heck do you know it exists if it is so impossible to test for? The results are strong enough you are quite sure astrology works, but you’d apparently (according you) need an improbably large dataset to know if it works. I’m confused.
I would say that yes, most “real” astrologers do believe in what they are doing, but that most astrologers are not in the business of writing horoscopes, they are doing birth charts for specific clients, and often, but not always, supplementing the astrological work with other “talents” such as general intuitive or psychic insight or Tarot cards or what have you.
My mom is an astrologer. It’s clear that she believes very much in what she is doing as well as in it’s general accuracy. And she’s put a lot of work and training into her skill. And some of the stuff she comes up with for her clients is specific enough to raise my eyebrows. But I never let her do it for me because:
She’s fairly emotional and it’s clear that even if she is getting accurate information, her feelings for me as her son will easily distort whatever information she is getting and be heavily colored by her worries for me and how she feels I should live my life.
She doesn’t know how to dumb it down. She’ll use all sorts of astrological jargon as though I were a fellow astrologer and would know what it signifies.
She’s not a generally optimistic personality, so she tends to focus more on giving out “this is a bad time to do this” and “watch out for this aspect” than on “this would be a great time to do this” or “you have this to look forward to”.
Unfortunately her husband is although occasionally impressed by her results, reluctant to put much faith in anything spiritual, and her other son is not only atheist, but obnoxiously so, berating her at times.
As for me, as with all strange phenomenon, I’ve seen just enough to raise my eyebrow, but never enough to fully convince me. So I keep an open mind and find it interesting but won’t put any actual stock into until such time as I have some overwhelmingly convincing experience.
A question for the astrologers and believers in astrology participating in this thread, and please correct me if I’m wrong: Is it o.k. if we ask questions about how astrology works, but rude if we question if it works at all? That is the general impression I’m getting here when people are asking for evidence or showing opposing evidence. This attitude of “What I believe is not subject to scientific investigation, and it is rude and disrespectful to bring it up, so I will not involve myself in such conversations.” disturbs me, no matter what the belief is.
If there was a correlation, why assume the cause is celestial? Wouldn’t it make more sense for children to be influenced by their direct environment? Like kids born during a certain time of the year will be at an influential age during the harvest and so they won’t see their parents for as long or something of that sort.
You now have a postulate. Nothing more. Your next step, if you want anyone to take you seriously, is to devise a test to prove it. Until you prove it, my postulate is you are wrong and it is pure fantasy. And since you are proposing something that has no reasonable scientific basis for its mechanism, the burden of proof is upon you, not me.
But I guess you answered the OP. At least some astrologers believe in what they are preaching.
We’ve gotten well and truly sidetracked from the OP. Based on what I’ve read here, I’d like to rephrase the question. It’s clear that some practitioners of astrology actually do believe in what they’re saying, but they’re basing it all on books that other people have written. Confirmation bias brings them to believe what they’ve read, just like their customers.
BUT, is it possible that the people who wrote those books actually believed them? Did they just randomly assign traits to signs? There’s clearly and obviously no scientific evidence behind any of it (PLEASE don’t let this thread devolve further into a debate on whether astrology has any validity: it has never been demonstrated to have any statistical meaning whatsoever, and all you have to do is meet a pair of twins to realize that). To those of you who actually believe in this stuff, I’ve posted almost 3,000 messages here, and I don’t think I’ve mentioned my birthday. You should be able to unambiguously tell me when I was born. Go for it.
Information like “Virgos are loving and kind” needed to come from somewhere originally. Since it sure as heck didn’t come from a scientific study, that leaves only two possibilities:
The inventor(s) of astrology based everything on personal observations of friends and associates, extrapolating that to the world at large and fitting in counterexamples as best they could. In other words, they actually believed it.
The inventor(s) of astrology carefully wrote descriptions that were intentionally vague and ambiguous and used them to dupe people out of their money. In other words, they didn’t believe it.
Which is true (or closer to the truth)?
But Elucidator, the contention that only with a vast database and unlimited processing power could we reach any scientific conclusions about astrology is simply nonsensical.
How about the above mentioned assertion that Virgos tend to be organized? How hard is it to design a test for organization, apply the test to 100 people, and see if Virgos tend to score higher than non Virgos? That’s not hard, that’s the kind of science that psychologists and sociologists do every day.
And since there are psychological tests given out every day for all sorts of reasons, there are already huge databases of psychological test results, and those test results can be correlated with birth date. So if we predict that Virgos are more organized, we simply take an existing database of test results, decide what results would indicate “organized”, then sort by birth date. It’s easy and simple.
Or are you saying that we DON’T know that Virgos are more organized…in fact, we can’t say anything about Virgos at all, since the whole point of the above study would be to show what if any personality traits Virgos might have. Except if that’s true, if we can’t say anything about someone’s personality traits from their sun sign, that there might be astrological influences on personality, but we don’t know what those influences are, and it would take years of research to discover them, then that’s just another way of saying that astrology as popularly believed is nonsense.
You already have a belief that given someone’s time of birth, place of birth, and perhaps other such data, you can often come up with useful information about that person. But you also seem to have the idea that unless such information is 100% replicable, it’s not amenable to scientific investigation. But that’s wrong, just take a look at how medical trials are done. A doctor has a hypothesis that a certain treatment can be effective, they perform the treatment on X number of patients, perform a placebo treatment on X patients, and then outcomes are compared. The doctor doesn’t need to show that 100% of patients who got the treatment were cured, they just have to show statistically significant better outcomes.
So if we have an astrological hypothesis based on any sort of anecdotal evidence, that is easily testable. It wouldn’t require a gigantic world-straddling colossus of a database, it requires a simple analysis of a few hundred test scores, and those tests don’t have to be administered for the sole purpose of astrological testing, we can get test scores done for other purposes, as long as we can associate a test result with a date of birth.
So. Are Virgos more organized? Are Leos more confident? Are Libras more indecisive? If they are, this can be tested EASILY. And in fact, such tests have already been done many times, and shockingly, no such correlations have been discovered. Turns out Virgos are NOT more X, while Geminis are more Y. Doesn’t hold up.
And that doesn’t even touch on the objection that even if Virgos have quality X, how did ancient astrologers discover that fact? What method did they use to satisfy themselves that Virgos really have said quality?
You missing the crucial factor: the sun sign is not that significant. It is what is popularly siezed upon in the common ignorance, but it just ain’t so. A Libra with a number of planets in Virgo is much more likely to exhibit typical Virgo behavior than simply a Virgo sun sign.
The experiment I posited would require a vast sample base to compensate for that fact: for a tendency to surface based on sun sign alone, you would be looking for a small but significant number, and for a small number to be significant you need a very large sample. And that sample needs to be taken from the center of the sign, as far as possible from other influence.
Now, I hasten to point out that the only reason I posit such an experiment is for purposes of illustration. There are some situations that simply don’t permit a definitive empirical test, for good or ill, this is one of them.
IW suggestion above, that I bask in the luminous intelligence of his prose for 3,000 entries and then reverse-engineer his birth data is perfectly ridiculous, which he might have known had he troubled to find the meagrest information on the subject. It is the sort of “proof” demanded by those entirely secure in their opinion, unchallenged by and free from any contaminating information.
I may be wrong, but at least I know what the heck I’m talking about.
Boring personal history follows: you have been warned!
I was insulted. I was told by a smug hippy that mine was the sign of stubborn and unintelligent bulls. (Wasn’t wearing my Mensa pin, or I might have stabbed him with it.) It pissed me off, so I went looking for information to crush this dippy beneath the grinding heels of my intellect. I even went to the trouble of learning the rudiments of chart casting, not easy for a mathtard. But nobody was gonna call me stubborn and get away with it! Did one for my SO, Cancer rising, moon in Cancer. Book says a soft, round, physique with a tendency to the ah, Rubenesque. Hoo, doggies. Just a coincidence, I said. But the mighty fortress of my certainty was just the teensiest bit shaken. (She just smiled in that annoying way she had when she was suggesting that maybe smart wasn’t the whole ball game.)
And I went from there. Thing is, for a rationalist like myself, this shouldn’t work at all, there should only be hits by coincidence, and the descriptions offered were too distinct to allow for that. Its not that it worked perfectly, flawlessly. In that case I could entertain the notion that I’d gone around the bend, might as well go hunting for Mescalito in the cactus. Hits and misses, like anything else but! there shouldn’t have been any hits to speak of. Its kind of like Johnson comparing women authors to dancing dogs: not that its done well, but done at all.
So. Here a great mind overthrown. I got to a point where I could believe my own judgement and intelligence, or stick to an abstract standard of rationality. I chose my own mind, and, over all, have found the experience rewarding and interesting. (If an interested neophyte is reading, a hint: casting charts for total strangers is the only way to learn. Forget you even have a chart, or your close friends and relatives, etc. Forest and trees.)
I drifted away from practicing and teaching, such is life. Perhaps part of it was the dread certainty that sooner or later, some smug asshole would tell me for the 10,000th time about the precession of the equinoxes like he expected my jaw to drop in astonishment, and I would tear out his throat with my teeth. Not that Taureans are violent, actually quite patient and calm, but we can only take so much…
The truth is my gift. Make of it what you will.
Yes, but it doesn’t have to be THAT significant, it just has to be significant to some degree. WhyNot is positive that your sun sign is pretty dang significant, she’s never met a Virgo who didn’t exhibit traits X, Y, and Z, and so on.
Sociologists draw conclusions from that kind of data all the time. Are kids who grow up in families with gay parents more likely to have such and such behaviors? Are kids with one parent in prison more or less likely to graduate from high school? How strong is the correlation between standardized test scores in 8th grade and college graduation 8 years later? And so on.
It doesn’t matter that some or even most Virgos aren’t super-organized, only that Virgos TEND to be super-organized. And if we find that Virgos are no more likely to be organized than non-Virgos, then we’ve found something significant, maybe not to you, but it would be news to WhyNot who’s SURE Virgos are more organized, every Virgo she knows is organized. Are you saying she’s mistaken?
And when you say astrology provided you with hits and misses, but you expected to find NO hits, that’s the trouble. Why did you expect no hits? A blind squirrel finds the occasional nut. The number of nuts a squirrel finds can’t be used to show whether the squirrel is blind or sighted unless you know how many nuts you expect a blind squirrel to find and how many you expect a sighted squirrel to find. If that squirrel you’re testing comes back with his cheek pouches bulging with nuts every day, is he blind or sighted? You can’t tell!
Ahh, prom night…
Wait, what? No, I quite agree with elucidator, thanks for asking.
Didn’t you write the above? Does the above mean that you’ve never before run across a flakey Virgo or a cold Cancer? Or something else?
Lem, I am underlining, perhaps exaggerating, you are seizing on the particular. My point is simply that the hits I got were way outside the range of random chance, it left me no place to hide. I could have taken shelter in the “confirmation bias”, I suppose, but that would be trusting an abstract standard over my own good sense and judgement. I trust me, and made my choice. I don’t regret it one bit, but it was rather an uncomfortable transition. It is just about my only sin against the rationalist creed, but if it be mortal, so be it. I don’t blame anyone for rejecting it, their experience is not mine. I’m not the least bit interested in “converting” anyone, who knows? maybe I am nuts. If I was, how would I know? Heck, I used to think Ayn Rand was a philosopher, Jim Morrison was a poet and Herman Hesse was deep. Kinda tough to get dumber than that.
The traits in these descriptions seem specific at first but if you really think about it, they don’t say much. If you ask someone if they’re organized, they’ll either say “Yeah I guess I’m pretty organized” or “No, I’m not very organized”. If you’re either one or the other, then the horoscope’s got a 50% chance of nailing that particular trait. Not a very stunning prediction. What does “organized” really mean anyway? Ask me one day if I’m organized, and depending on the state of my room, I’ll give different answers. I’d be more impressed if it successfully predicted one’s favorite color, food allergies, or greatest fears…categories much harder to guess successfully.
Except there’s no reason to ignore the impact of the other factors and focus exclusively on the sun sign, so talking about the difficulty in testing exclusively for the sun-sign is irrelevent. I mean, we have the full rules of astrology available, so if somebody’s birthdate indicates that they’re nominally a Libra but with three parts Virgo, a half a cup of Leo and a dash of Scorpio for flavor, then we can just run the numbers and determine what that astrology scheme predicts about their character, based on the full rules of the astrology scheme we’re using. And then based on that we run the numbers on the 3000 people in our personality database and see how well the astrology scheme has described reality. If the results are as accurate as you indicate, it should start differentiating from randomity with much smaller populations than even that.
Now, I don’t know if any of the tests that have been done so far calculated full charts rather than just simply checking their sign, but regardless this sort of testing could be done. I mean, you say that “casting charts for total strangers is the only way to learn”; if a person can learn something that way, so can an objective automated test, clearly.
Based on the sounds of this system, agreed. It doesn’t sound like the same dates have the same ‘meanings’ on different years, also it doesn’t sound like a given ‘meaning’ would only be associated with a single date or a single contiguous span of dates per year.
However, if there is a unique forward mapping, from date to ‘meaning’ (set of personality and physical characteristics, that is), then it would be a theoretically meaningful (if ancecdotal) test for someone to tell you their birthdate, and then compare the results of the chart you cast against themselves, correct? Sure it wouldn’t be exactly a double-blind test, but presumably you could tell them something that they hadn’t yet revealed over the internet. (Not to say that you want to go through the effort of casting a chart just to convince one person; this is just to ascertain whether you’d agree that would be a non-ridiculous approach.)
(I also agree that it’s ridiculous to expect you to ascertain a person’s personality from a mere 3000 internet posts, assuming you’ve even read and remembered them all. (Not to mention that, regardless of their birthdate, on the internet everyone’s sign is the Ass.))
That sounded like the method I used to ascertain that I can control the past by leveraging murphy’s law; that is, that if I have prepared for the something, it is less likely to have occured. The personal experience supports it and cannot be denied. That’s how it works, right?
It was an ill-thought out pithy retort, not a reasonable response, and I apologize. I would have communicated more effectively had I written something more like:
Of the people I’ve gotten to know over the years, or the strangers I’ve talked to about astrology, I’ve not yet run into someone who didn’t fit the patterns when multiple signs, houses and their relationships are taken into account. The more I learn, the more things make sense.
Although, no, I’ve never knowingly run across a flakey Virgo as it happens. I’ve known plenty who *claim *to be flakey, but they’re all less flakey than I. Just like people with cleaning related OCD claim to be slobs when you can eat off their floor - their very nature of being dissatisfied is what causes them to act in the way they say they aren’t.
OTOH, I don’t ask strangers in the grocery store what their natal wheels look like, either. So I’m probably missing a whole lot of Virgos in my sample selection.
Likewise, I’ve only known half a dozen Cancers, and yeah, they were all so warm and nurturing as to be smothering, as it happens. And, uh, “round”, although not always overweight.