Sure! But it would still be tainted by being anecdotal, hence, not strictly empirical. Which is the impossible standard demanded, no?
Whynot or elucidator, would either of you be willing to give my natal wheel a shot? I’ll be completely honest about what fits me. I’m sure you can tell I’m skeptical, but I’d like to know what sort of specifics the deeper intricacies of astrology say other than my sun sign. What percentage of it would have to be correct to consider it a good one?
Nope. Out of the game, I don’t play, I don’t suit up.
And this is the nub of the disagreement. You are convinced that the hits you got were way outside the range of random chance, but what do you base that decision on? The more horoscopes you cast the more hits you got? Except getting hits doesn’t mean a thing unless you can measure how many hits you’d expect by random chance. And the human brain is notoriously poor at judging that sort of thing. Visit Las Vegas if you don’t believe me.
It takes very careful thinking to avoid this kind of trap. If you cast horoscopes and get hit after hit, you might suppose that is some sort of support for Astrology. But you have no basis for that conclusion, because you have no idea how many hits you’d get at random. You cast a horoscope for Jane Doe, she’s a Virgo, and your horoscope says Virgos are organized, and lo and behold you discover that Jane IS organized. It’s a hit! Except it proves nothing.
This is how science is done. Not with gigantic databases and towering supercomputers, but with simple comparisons of test data to what would be expected by random chance. How do we know smallpox vaccine works? How do we know protease inhibitors are affective against HIV? How do we know that kids who go graduate from high school make more money than kids who don’t? How do we know that thimerosol doesn’t cause autism? How do we know that blacks are more likely to spend time in prison than whites? How do we know that children raised by gay parents are no more likely to become dog-rapists than kids raised by straight parents?
This isn’t impossibly difficult stuff. This is testing people for personality traits, and then seeing if said traits have any sort of correlation to any sort of astrological sign. This is not difficult science. THIS IS TRIVIAL. This is the sort of thing that one guy with an assistant and a questionaire could find out in a few months of work. Now why don’t we see such studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine? Is it because they’re too difficult? Because scientists have small hearts and closed minds? No, that’s not the reason.
Right; for that we have the previously described test, where you program the astrological system into a computer (which should be simple if it’s mathematical and objective) and run it in an automated manner on a database of victims.
Which would also be a theoretically meaningful test, right? Which would mean that the issue can be examined in a systematic, scientific manner.
I can’t, because I clearly suck at this. 
No, in all seriousness, I know just enough to get it all wrong, and all I could do was make some very intuitive leaps about your Sun, Moon and Ascendant and maybe your Mars. I don’t know the rest.
But you can get a free natal wheel and brief report at astro.com if you know your birth information. It covers some of the main planets and the houses they’re in, but it doesn’t go into the relationships between your planets or the more detailed stuff astrologers go nuts over. To get that stuff, you have to pay.
I don’t know how *good *their reports are, mind. Mine seems to jibe pretty well with what actual astrologers have told me about me, but it could be a fluke, I suppose. It does suffer from the vagueosity problem, but that’s, again, because it doesn’t take into account the relationships between things.
Yeah, it’s pretty vague. Some of it fits, some of it is completely the opposite. Heh, I’m a Cancer and I’ve had multiple people call me a robot because I lack emotion.
You know, the above nearly moves me to tears of frustration.
See how this works?
You meet a Virgo. She seems pretty organized. Hit.
You meet a Virgo. She seems disorganized. But then you find that she is organized in some ways…she always eats breakfast in the same way, for example. Hit.
You meet a Virgo. She seems disorganized. On further investigation she still seems disorganized. But then you find out that she’s a Mars rising, and Mars is a disorganized planet, so that explains why she’s the exception. Hit.
You meet a Virgo. She seems disorganized, you study her chart a little more, but you still can’t understand it. But there are lots of things about astrology you don’t understand, so you’re confident that if you studied bit more you’d discover why she was the exception. Hit.
Everything’s a hit, can’t you see? And if everything’s a hit, nothing’s a hit.
Using Patty O’Furniture’s list, and as a Virgo- about 50-60% fit, at least 25-35% would vary according to the mood I was in at that time, though they were all pretty subjective, and 15% just weren’t me.
A passing grade, but I wouldn’t break out the refrigerator magnets or rush to write any scientific journals.
Again, like religion, it’s all just fishing. Most of the time you don’t actually get a bite, but when you do it is so amazing that it keeps coming back for more, just *knowing * that the lake is completely full of fish and you’ll catch another any second now. You remember the bites and forget the waiting. So long as it works for you and is not hurting anyone else, then fish on.
FWIW I’d consider myself a Taoist, and am always amazed, and sometimes annoyed, at the way completely unrelated things all to too often “match up” and flow together in perfect time. I don’t know how to describe it really; symbols, signs, synchronicity, magic, mirrors, and metaphors everywhere and in everything. Ironically, I think this is due in large part to me taking things way too literal(another Virgo trait! dum, dum, dumm)
Or maybe something just slipped by Life’s IT and QC departments during my production. Possibli…
Just the same, I can’t deny what I experience, but I can’t prove it either.
Unless, and brace yourself now, 'cause this one’s a doozy - unless everything’s a hit.
You realize that he was pointing out that it would be a hit no matter what you were claiming was the case, since you appear to be willing to keep searching for a ‘match’ no matter how tenuous the connection you must reach to pretend there is one.
Like if I said that all people are blonde. Some people of course are obviously blonde; others I have to ‘interpret’ a little. (e.g, “strawberry blonde”, “dark blonde”.) Still others I can discover that they have one dark and one blonde gene, and call that a match. Others might have been blonde earlier in life. Others I might have to resort to saying they have “blonde personalities”. And for the remainder: “spiritually blonde”.
Viola! Everybody’s blond! I was right all along.
Am I? I don’t know. So far, I haven’t had to be willing to do that, because the connections I’ve observed haven’t been tenuous.
Oh, come on – you’re dodging the issue. I never implied luminous (or any other kind of intelligence) behind my posts, but that many posts have to give you some feeling for my personality. Here, I’ll give you some hints: I’m entrepreneurial; I score well on intelligence tests; I’m larger (physically) than average; my work areas tend to be sloppy; my memory is often bad; I have an aptitude for electronics, software, and logic design; I’m not afraid of doing new stuff (heck, I thrive on it); I’m married; I like animals; I hate animal-rights activists; I’m fiscally conservative; I’m “green,” but not to the point of being anal-retentive or annoying; and I believe strongly in both human rights and personal responsibility.
What’s my birthday? You can’t answer that question (or even tell me my sign), because there’s no statistical correlation between birthdays and personality traits. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Zilch.
I’ve discussed astrology with quite a few people in the last couple of years, including some adamant supporters of it. Not one person has been able to find a statistical study that proves that one’s sign has any significance whatsoever. Not one single book or Web site I’ve consulted can point out a study. When I was in high school, one of my friends had her horoscope drawn (or cast, or whatever the proper word is). She was astonished at how accurate it was. We passed it around to ten other people with different signs, and they all felt it described them just as accurately as it described her.
People have been practicing astrology for hundreds of years, and there’s never been one single solitary statistical study that demonstrates its validity? If there was even the slightest, tiniest, shred of statistical correlation, somebody would have published it in a peer-reviewed journal. Given that they haven’t, how can you possibly consider it anything other than a scam or an amusing party game?
Right, and what she’s saying is that it’s always right. A Virgo not acting like a Virgo is analogous to any theory of science that has since been disproven. More information comes to light and voila, new theory.
I don’t disagree with the original point though.
Well yes. But which is it? And how would we go about telling the difference?
There are methods we could use to determine the difference. These methods require a little careful thought, but aren’t anything mysterious or difficult to anyone who can pass high school algebra.
Except you and Elucidator and other astrology buffs for some reason are convinced that these methods can’t work on astrology.
These methods will work on astrology. They have worked on astrology. We have results of scientific investigation of astrology. Astrology has been rigourously tested over the last several hundred years. And the results are that no one has been able to demonstrate any sort of correlation between astrological chart and personality.
So when we study 100 Virgos and find that it turns out that Virgos are no more likely to be “organized” than non Virgos, Cancers are no more likely to be emotional than non Cancers, what does that mean? Then the handwaving comes in. We have to take into account secondary effects, not just the sun sign. Except the sun sign itself is worthless, yet you believe the sun sign tells you a lot about a person. Cognitive dissonance. The sun sign is only unimportant to astrologers when someone proposes simple psychological tests to see if it’s important. Then suddenly the sun sign doesn’t matter, because it’s swamped by thousands of other factors. Except those thousands of other factors are too complex for investigation, except somehow astrologers are able to take them into account anyway. Except how did the astrologers know to take them into account in the first place, if they can’t be demonstrated to exist?
Exactly! Which brings us directly back to the OP (as restated in post #109). If astrological concepts can’t be tested or proven, then the people who dreamed it up were either (1) guessing and then deluding themselves into believing it using confirmation bias, or (2) scam artists.
I started the thread to try and figure out which it is. After two pages, it was clear that (a) at least some of today’s astrologers actually do believe it, but (b) they didn’t create any of the concepts. That’s why I’m trying to re-target the question to relate to the people who wrote this stuff in the first place.
Well, I gave my guess about that in post 110. In short: I don’t think there was ever any overt guessing or scamming on the part of the originators; I think it was drawn from other existing mythology and adapted into its current state with the help of wishful thinking and heavy doses of confirmation bias. I’m sure no malice was ever intended.
(And I still maintain that astrological concepts definitely can be tested and proven…unless you don’t want to discover that they’re hokum, anyway.)
How do you deterine your date/time of conception? that would seem to be a problem…
I’d say the likeliest theory is that they simply matched traits of the constellation to the person. A Leo is brave, a Taurus is stubborn, a Scorpio is untrustworthy, simply because the zodiacal signs are a lion, a bull, and a scorpion. And those traits are filtered through various cultural assumptions about the mythological figures represented. If eventually Gemini comes to represent Castor and Pollux in ancient Greece, then astrologers ascribe traits from the mythology of Castor and Pollux, maybe you decide Geminis like boxing and horsebreaking. Back in Babylon it might have meant something else, depending on what mythological twins the constellation represented in Babylonian mythology. And so on.
And some traits get dropped, no one expects their horoscope to read “You have a human torso and a horse’s body and enjoy archery. You would make a good teacher for demigods and invented poetry. Beware poisoned arrows.”
Constellation as totem? Certainly fits.