3 ms·

I sometimes wonder if there is some truth in astrology, especially in places where you have seasons, because of the environmental stimuli in your first months a

I sometimes wonder if there is some truth in astrology, especially in places where you have seasons, because of the environmental stimuli in your first months as a baby? More sunlight, longer days for the summer astral signs versus dark days and being inside for winter astral signs. Maybe "Gemini" are so "energetic" because their forming months are in a time when people spend more time going out and enjoying the summer while the "Capricorn" is more "analytic" because it first experience is a winter of being inside, experiencing more reflectiv activities?

stocknoob 5y ago
Astrologers ask your sign but never what hemisphere you were born in.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Good online tests ask for birthdate, city and/or lat/long.
- forgetfulness 5y ago
  The horoscope doesn't, but more involved astrology will take into account time and location to know the positions and thus supposed influence of various celestial bodies on you. Needless to say, just because a system is complex and based on some concepts taken from nature, it doesn't make its claims true.
mumblemumble 5y ago
The one problem here is, it would be really difficult - I would argue impossible - to demonstrate any effect in a convincing way. It's impossible to run a controlled experiment, and it's impossible to tease out and pin down all the confounding variables. It's what we referred to in one class I took as "fundamentally unanswerable questions." (Yes, the acronym was deliberate.) Worse, with the way standard statistical methods have been laid out, if you ignore the fuqedness of the question and go looking for correlations anyway, you are virtually guaranteed to find all sorts of them. About 1 in 20 things you think to look at will yield a statistically significant result. By definition. The classic XKCD on this effect is https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
kortex 5y ago
"Proper" astrology is way more precise than season you were born in. The 12-sun-sign newspaper astrology isn't "proper astrology," which is far more granular. E.g. my sun, moon, and mercury sign are all in Cancer, which predicts that I'm a moody ball of fluctuating emotions that turn on a whim (which is 100% accurate), and a bunch of other minutiae I forget now. That's the weird thing: astrology done right isn't vague, broadly applicable cold-reading. The confirmation bias helps, but it's super faceted, and still manages to be right more than wrong. Nowadays I chalk that up to something akin to the birthday paradox, plus maybe some memory construction as TFA mentions, but I've done some insanely detailed readings that were kinda spooky. Source: was super into astrology as a teen. I had/have huge thick tomes of charts.

stocknoob 5y ago

Astrologers ask your sign but never what hemisphere you were born in.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ipaddr 5y ago
Good online tests ask for birthdate, city and/or lat/long.
forgetfulness 5y ago
The horoscope doesn't, but more involved astrology will take into account time and location to know the positions and thus supposed influence of various celestial bodies on you. Needless to say, just because a system is complex and based on some concepts taken from nature, it doesn't make its claims true.

mumblemumble 5y ago

The one problem here is, it would be really difficult - I would argue impossible - to demonstrate any effect in a convincing way. It's impossible to run a controlled experiment, and it's impossible to tease out and pin down all the confounding variables. It's what we referred to in one class I took as "fundamentally unanswerable questions." (Yes, the acronym was deliberate.) Worse, with the way standard statistical methods have been laid out, if you ignore the fuqedness of the question and go looking for correlations anyway, you are virtually guaranteed to find all sorts of them. About 1 in 20 things you think to look at will yield a statistically significant result. By definition. The classic XKCD on this effect is https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/

kortex 5y ago

"Proper" astrology is way more precise than season you were born in. The 12-sun-sign newspaper astrology isn't "proper astrology," which is far more granular. E.g. my sun, moon, and mercury sign are all in Cancer, which predicts that I'm a moody ball of fluctuating emotions that turn on a whim (which is 100% accurate), and a bunch of other minutiae I forget now. That's the weird thing: astrology done right isn't vague, broadly applicable cold-reading. The confirmation bias helps, but it's super faceted, and still manages to be right more than wrong. Nowadays I chalk that up to something akin to the birthday paradox, plus maybe some memory construction as TFA mentions, but I've done some insanely detailed readings that were kinda spooky. Source: was super into astrology as a teen. I had/have huge thick tomes of charts.