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Ever since I was kidnapped by aliens and probed in the most undignified manner, and they all read the horoscope in the National Perspirer, I am a dyed-in-the-wool devotee...
Being a soul who craves logic, I've been looking for links between FACT and Astrology. Sometimes, for fun I will read my horoscope, and every once in a while it is frightfully accurate. How much faith do you put in astrology, and why?
None at all; the predictions given will always match up with some individuals' experiences for the given day, seemingly giving the "pseudoscience" some undeserved credibility. IMHO.
I used to be a believer in Astrology and I used to try and think of how it possibly works, thinking of unseen energies from the stars and so on. The usual argument you will get from a believer is "get a full chart done and you will see how accurate it is". I was thinking about this today and I have come up with an idea on why they seem so accurate and why there are those who believe adamantly and why there will be those who will never believe...and also all of the shades of belief in between those two polarities.
When a psychologist wants to do some qualitative research on a human behaviour they will often use a sample of the population to test the hypothesis. A good random sample provides a good idea of the overall population when they are selected well. The larger the sample, the more you can get results that have generalizability to the whole population.
When you apply this idea to Astrology it suddenly becomes very clear how it works. There are twelve signs of the zodiac. Therefore we have twelve sample groups of the worlds population, that's a huge sample. Baring in mind that all twelve groups are divided only by DOB, a truly random sample in scientific terms.
Lets take one of these sample groups. The group called Leo have a DOB from late July to late August. A typical Leonine trait would be leadership, we ask this sample group to answer the question..."do you think you would be a good leader?"... a certain percentage of this group would answer "yes". Members of this sub-group would be considered a typical Leo and they would be most likely to believe that Astrology is true.
If you take the Leos that said no and do a full astrological chart for them you could explain their lack of leadership skills by a strong planetary influence or that the Sun was in opposition to something-or-other when they were born. Making them unable to express their natural Leonine tendencies. These qualifiers would match up with another percentage of this sub-group making those who investigate this far into it believers as well.
What we are left with at the end is a group of people, some of whom will always believe it is rubbish because they have never identified with the character traits at all. The others may be those who know their full chart and see some correlation and so are unsure if it's true or not.
Any of the sample groups (in this case any of the zodiac signs) would have the same result with the same question on leadership. That's how I believe it works for describing individuals.
As for predicting events, I'm not sure but I do wonder how far the number of accurate predictions deviate from what would occur by chance.
Sorry, but Randi was just too close-minded for me to give him any credence on anything. There are other skeptics that do a decent job, but Randi is NOT one of them. He has his own very bitter agenda.
harry: If you mean that he is a no-nonsense kind of guy and loves to expose charlatans and tomfoolery, then I suppose that makes him close-minded in a way. What is this 'bitter agenda' of his you refer to?
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