Astrology accurately explains many things. In a sense, yes. Astrology as practiced usually consists of feeding a number of Barnum statements to those whose horoscope is being cast. Barnum statements are statements that tend to be accurate descriptions of people and events, but which most people think are only accurate descriptions of them (ie they pick out aspects of events and people that seem unique but are in fact common).
So astrology, in a sense, as practised, does explain many things.
But I don’t guess that’s what the questioner meant.
Well, feng shui isn’t complete bullshit. There actually is some validity to the correlation between how certain pieces of furniture are placed and how comfortable one feels in a room. For example, few people like to be seated with their backs to a door or large open space.
[/QUOTE]
But isn’t that something that is more in the domain of an interior designer, or just of a person with some style, or common sense?
My favourite word on feng shui comes from David Tang, the socialite and owner of the Shanghai Tang chain of shops. He was being interviewed on the BBC about the subject and described in some length how when he got married he had all the furniture in his bedroom arranged by a feng shui expert. “Did it work?” asked the Beeb. “No, we were divorced the following year,” replied Tang in his plummy, not to say, rather effete, Oxbridge accent.
It is an enormous business in Hong Kong, where even the most rational people are in thrall to it.
I took the PC test a while back, but i don’t remember my score. Both axes were in the mid-negative range, IIRC.
I disagree with Prop 51, for similar reasons as my fellow posters, but I had some thoughts.
There has been an increased push in the last decade to legitimize astrology, beginning with the release of The Secret Language of Birthdays in 1994. This book claims to have examined what evidence there is of the personalities of notable people for whom we also have birthdates, and extracted the commonalities as an “objective” examination of the truth of astrology. Each two-page spread (one for each date of the year) spells out the personality traits typical of people born on that day. Very interesting on the surface, and a quick perusal of the book (as I made in my Aunt’s copy) shows that it does indeed move a baby step beyond the Forer effect: Look at your birthday and those close by, and you find yourself nodding a lot. Look at different parts of the year, not so much. The book was a great success, and I’ve seen a number of clones at my local Borders recently. It is great fun.
But it is not great science. Throughout, it assumes its conclusion, casting doubt on the objectivity of its examinations. When dealing with the problem of the Calendar change that took place in America (in, what was it, the 1800s?) they state their decision to stick with the recorded birthdate, rather than recalculate to account for the actual position of the Earth at the time. This, of course, proves exactly the opposite of what they intended. If the detailed descriptions of the personalities are indeed accurate and based on some objective measure (they obviously could not be), then by not calculating calendar correction, they have proved that their observations can not possibly be due to any effects of astrology. Oh, well.
At first glance, I would have thought a question like this would be included in the PC test to see how “open-minded” a person is (a sadly large number of my fellow leftees lead with their heart and not their head in my experience), and the (seemingly, to me) left-leaning Political Compass folks would send your assessment in a leftward direction. But apparently not, if the results reported by other Dopers are true. They seem to place far too much stock in the Reagan’s belief in astrology as an indicator of conservativism.