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I‘m pretty agnostic but I see the benefits of religious societies. One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology especially among well-educated people.

I‘m pretty agnostic but I see the benefits of religious societies. One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology especially among well-educated people. When I frame it as just another religion I received confusion in return because apparently they see it as a rational thing to believe in. This was just a personal anecdote from my experience using Bumble and Tinder in a middle eastern country and in the US until I actually checked it on google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0h6434d https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

UncleOxidant 4y ago
> One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology I'm not sure astrology ever went away. Nancy Reagan famously consulted her astrologer in the 80s. It was big in the 60s/70s too. There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years, but we've been in a rational age for a couple of hundred years where you'd think it would've just completely gone away, but it hasn't. A lot of people are superstitious and want to look for causality where there is none even in modernity.
- wpietri 4y ago
  And I should add that it gives people a convenient language to talk about personalities and human characteristics. Clearly people find it (and other things, like ennegrams, tarot, palmistry, Myers Briggs, etc) useful as a way of structuring the vast complexity of humans in a society. I would love to have something equivalently helpful and engaging that isn't based on superstitions. But something like the Big 5 model is a mouthful of sawdust compared with the other things I mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
  - mst 4y ago
    I find the Big 5 useful for self awareness in the large. For self awareness in the small (i.e. surfacing my subconscious view of a specific situation) I've always been fond of rune casting, or in a pinch a dice roll or coin flip. In the sense that if I'm faced with a choice between two options, I flip a coin for it, and immediately upon seeing the results can tell if that's the 'right' answer or not.
- cole-k 4y ago
  > There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years Must be because of a comet that passes by on that cadence.
alasdair_ 4y ago
The interesting thing about astrology is that there probably ARE personality differences between, say, a cohort who were the youngest at school versus the oldest, or who just made the cutoff point for a sports team for the year versus those who were almost a year older. Those small differences can become magnified (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell's essay on why most Hockey players were born in December - they are older, so they look like they are more competent, so they get more training, so they become more competent). Even things like the amount of exposure to sunlight in early years may influence personality. Would be an interesting thing to look at, skipping all the woo stuff about planetary alignment etc.
- robbiep 4y ago
  That’s not really an interesting thing about astrology though, is it? That’s an interesting hypothesis about if or why or how people’s personalities may vary. Which is easily searchable - for example, results for ‘MBTI distribution by birth month’ show no correlation, which I would think would be a reasonable way of getting to the start of this answer. I also tried searching for distribution of astrological signs by birth month and it was weird but there was a 1:1 distribution (… I joke) But the fact you didn’t investigate this and jumped straight to support of astrology clearly pegs you as a Virgo
wpietri 4y ago
> I‘m pretty agnostic but I see the benefits of religious societies. And I should add that it's a mistake to think there's no intersection between atheism and religious societies. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-agnostic https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-... Or one might consider something like Insight Meditation. I went for a number of meetings here in San Francisco. I never heard anything theistic mentioned; it was just meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition, followed by a talk on meditation. Lovely people, nice community, perfectly rational in the small-R sense of the term. One could call it religion or not, but it served some of the same social functions. Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/ https://deathcafe.com/what/
- astrange 4y ago
  > Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/ https://deathcafe.com/what/ Ironically (or not), Buddhism definitely involves meditating about death, but it might be harder to encounter it in the modern world where you don't have nine children six of whom died of consumption. It sounds a bit boring though. They should start a fight club, or throw themselves off cliffs, or something.
- mst 4y ago
  Being agnostic and having grown up in England, I regard myself as Secular Anglican and I think so do many of my countrymen (many people I've discussed it with wouldn't use those exact words in self-description but immediately recognise and understand the thing and agree that we share it.) i.e. we have it as a sort of cultural and moral framework but faith (or lack thereof) is effectively orthogonal to that.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

> One trend that surprises me is the upturn of astrology I'm not sure astrology ever went away. Nancy Reagan famously consulted her astrologer in the 80s. It was big in the 60s/70s too. There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years, but we've been in a rational age for a couple of hundred years where you'd think it would've just completely gone away, but it hasn't. A lot of people are superstitious and want to look for causality where there is none even in modernity.

wpietri 4y ago
And I should add that it gives people a convenient language to talk about personalities and human characteristics. Clearly people find it (and other things, like ennegrams, tarot, palmistry, Myers Briggs, etc) useful as a way of structuring the vast complexity of humans in a society. I would love to have something equivalently helpful and engaging that isn't based on superstitions. But something like the Big 5 model is a mouthful of sawdust compared with the other things I mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
- mst 4y ago
  I find the Big 5 useful for self awareness in the large. For self awareness in the small (i.e. surfacing my subconscious view of a specific situation) I've always been fond of rune casting, or in a pinch a dice roll or coin flip. In the sense that if I'm faced with a choice between two options, I flip a coin for it, and immediately upon seeing the results can tell if that's the 'right' answer or not.
cole-k 4y ago
> There may be some cyclicity to the popularity of astrology where it tends to pop up every 10 or 20 years Must be because of a comet that passes by on that cadence.

alasdair_ 4y ago

The interesting thing about astrology is that there probably ARE personality differences between, say, a cohort who were the youngest at school versus the oldest, or who just made the cutoff point for a sports team for the year versus those who were almost a year older. Those small differences can become magnified (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell's essay on why most Hockey players were born in December - they are older, so they look like they are more competent, so they get more training, so they become more competent). Even things like the amount of exposure to sunlight in early years may influence personality. Would be an interesting thing to look at, skipping all the woo stuff about planetary alignment etc.

robbiep 4y ago
That’s not really an interesting thing about astrology though, is it? That’s an interesting hypothesis about if or why or how people’s personalities may vary. Which is easily searchable - for example, results for ‘MBTI distribution by birth month’ show no correlation, which I would think would be a reasonable way of getting to the start of this answer. I also tried searching for distribution of astrological signs by birth month and it was weird but there was a 1:1 distribution (… I joke) But the fact you didn’t investigate this and jumped straight to support of astrology clearly pegs you as a Virgo

wpietri 4y ago

> I‘m pretty agnostic but I see the benefits of religious societies. And I should add that it's a mistake to think there's no intersection between atheism and religious societies. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Buddhism https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-agnostic https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/atheist-... Or one might consider something like Insight Meditation. I went for a number of meetings here in San Francisco. I never heard anything theistic mentioned; it was just meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition, followed by a talk on meditation. Lovely people, nice community, perfectly rational in the small-R sense of the term. One could call it religion or not, but it served some of the same social functions. Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/ https://deathcafe.com/what/

astrange 4y ago
> Another good example is Death Cafe, local groups that meet regularly to have tea and talk about death. The ones I went to were profound and meaningful without being theistic: https://deathcafe.com/what/ https://deathcafe.com/what/ Ironically (or not), Buddhism definitely involves meditating about death, but it might be harder to encounter it in the modern world where you don't have nine children six of whom died of consumption. It sounds a bit boring though. They should start a fight club, or throw themselves off cliffs, or something.
mst 4y ago
Being agnostic and having grown up in England, I regard myself as Secular Anglican and I think so do many of my countrymen (many people I've discussed it with wouldn't use those exact words in self-description but immediately recognise and understand the thing and agree that we share it.) i.e. we have it as a sort of cultural and moral framework but faith (or lack thereof) is effectively orthogonal to that.