Been getting a lot of "how can you criticize astrology if you haven't studied it?"
Well, I similarly think flat earth theory is ridiculous without knowing all their complicated arguments. If a theory violates extremely basic scientific knowledge, the details don't matter.
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Ofc not saying it *can't* be true; there's a tiny possibility the earth is actually flat; but I'm not going to spend time deeply studying the details of every ridiculous theory out there before I criticize it.
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There's things that could happen that would bump up a ridiculous theory from "extremely unlikely" to "mostly unlikely" and maybe make it qualify for time spent studying it in depth; like if someone was even slightly able to predict an astrology chart, that'd make me doubletake.
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in fact there's several concrete things that would make me go "hm, this is actually surprising, i think i might have been wrong here" and NONE of those concrete things are in the category of "studying astrology more in depth"
A list of concrete things that would change my mind:
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1. i ask 200 people who havent seen their birth chart description to pick the one out of two that matches them. a success rate meaningfully higher than 50% (id preregister the number, just gotta calculate it first) would make me go hmmmmm
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2. have an astrologer look at someone's birth chart and pick the periods in life most likely to have big events. I then have the person identify the periods in their own life seebig events. Then we check how much they overlaps. Doesnt have to be perfect, just better than chance.
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3. i know astrology is very 'complicated' with tons of planets and whatever, but there's still some things that have more impact than others. we ask ppl's dominant sun/moon sign and ask about their personality; even a slight correlation would be convincing here
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Here's a list of people trying to study how predictive astrology is (h/t ). Before you look at the results, first predict what you think the results will be!
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you stuck to the pledge for half a day, incredible
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ok I pledge to seriously attempt to not get brigaded by angry twitter people for the rest of this year. I genuinely didn't expect the last one tho so this might be hard. I'm weirdly bad at predicting what ppl will get mad at me for given how much experience I have with twitter
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Have you considered that astrology is not a theory of how the world works but rather a system of making random decisions in a poetic way?
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i've considered it, but many astrologers in my mentions seem to disagree with you
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