Great, NPR is interviewing astrologers now
What with Pluto losing its planetness, now apparently NPR is letting us know that we might have to return those 39c astrology scrolls we bought on the counter at Wawa.
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What with Pluto losing its planetness, now apparently NPR is letting us know that we might have to return those 39c astrology scrolls we bought on the counter at Wawa.
August 24th, 2006 15:35
There have lots of studies - James Randi has conducted them as well - where you give a group of people each a specific horoscope and they all say how well it fit them and it turns out they were all given the same one. Who knows, maybe thousands of years ago astrology and/or astronomy had some bearing and was wrapped with other sciences. For now, an astrologer is only as good as he or she can do cold readings and/or get lucky.
Example: Jeanne Dixon (spelling may be wrong) - famous for predicting Kennedy assassination-she didn’t predict her own death. If you do enough shotgun approach castings - some of them may stick and those are the ones that people remember. If you believe your own hype, those seem to be the only ones remembered or rationalized off as well.
That being said, I still read the daily horoscopes even though they may be “cast” or “written” by Winky, the Los Angeles Times janitor’s cat picked by walking on sentences arranged on the floor in random patterns :).
August 24th, 2006 15:58
Oh yeah, saw a bit on TV where he did that with a classroom. Made a big deal out of saying he did everyone’s horoscope, had envelopes with each of their names printed on it, handed them out separately, etc. Then after most of them agreed it described them pretty well, had them pass their horoscopes to the people behind them, and they all found they had the same one.
It’s one of my favorite examples of subjectivity. With the postscript that one of the students still adamantly defended astrology after the demonstration. (Randi cheated? Didn’t use “real” astrology? What?)
August 24th, 2006 16:31
I don’t think Phil Plait’s debunking of astrology is the best one out there, but it’s still mighty entertaining:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/astrology.html
(It’s Bad Astronomy because that’s what he’s debunking. There are a number of entertaining pieces on there, including the weird notion we’ll likely hear about in upcoming weeks that you can balance an egg on end on the equinox.)
That said, one day in November 1989, my horoscope in the Boston Globe said, “If you work in publishing, you face a career change,” and I was laid off from the magazine I worked at that day. Unfortunately, my clipping’s been lost among many moves. (Even in the morning when it was still an abstract bunch of words on the page, I was struck by its mention of such a specific field.) I’m not a believer, but goddamn that’s a coincidence.
August 24th, 2006 22:59
Every now and then, I’m reminded that you used to live in Philly.
August 25th, 2006 08:17
Bob, any chance the magazine was affiliated with the Globe? If I wrote an astrology column and I had a strong tip about layoffs within the corporation, I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to allude to them.
August 25th, 2006 21:32
Huah? Wha’s a Wawa?
August 25th, 2006 21:35
Oh.
August 25th, 2006 22:29
Yeah, I was going to end it with “7-11″ but I decided it wasn’t punchy enough.
December 14th, 2007 14:57
I was just noticing that some of you guys think that the generic Horoscopes in the paper are real astrology. I don’t think anyone with half a brain actually believes that the news paper can predict their future. I think that there is more to the practice of Astrology than we get in the paper and magazines. More details about a specific person are required to make any kind of reading. Then again maybe it is just the power of suggestion that causes any type of prediction to come to pass.
December 15th, 2007 09:01
Okay, embarrassingly, I know an awful lot about natal astrology (beyond the newspaper rubbish). I know what an astrologer means when he says “Moon and ascendant in Scorpio, square Sun” (on the date, time, and location in question, the moon and the eastern horizon was in Scorpio, and the sun was 90 degrees from that location, so either it was noon, or midnight, the sun in Leo or Aquarius). I also know what conventional astrological wisdom suggests about some of these kinds of configurations (for what I described, it suggests someone with extremely strong, turbulent, and nakedly viewable emotions who usually, unsuccessfully, tries to hide them, and who usually finds those emotions get in the way of how they see themselves).
The reader can decide whether that’s vague enough. Honestly, when you more seriously get into than I ever did, you come to see other things (possible health problems that person may have to endure, recommendations for a proper diet, etc).
I also know a little bit about predictive astrology, although much less… somehow, you work out the interaction between one’s natal chart and the chart for a particular moment in time.
The stuff seems fairly spooky in accuracy, but honestly, it looks just vague enough to me that the rest could simply involve what you’re doing inside your own brain to make everything work for you. I guess you can think of professional astrology as a way to force your brain to think outside how its normal pattern of thought to work out alternatives.
As such, I don’t think it makes a wit of difference if an astrologer continues to predict with Pluto or not; you’ll still be able to use astrology to make yourself think outside logical patterns in an effort to derive solutions that could have some smattering of reason to it. Hell, you could accomplish the same results with tarot cards, yarrow sticks, dice, i ching, reading tea bags, or throwing darts at your newspaper’s astrology section.
December 30th, 2007 20:06
I believe it was George Carlin who noted that the nurse, doctor, midwife or whoever delivers a baby will have significantly more gravitational pull than starts or planets millions of miles away.