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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Brandon North
@brandonenorth
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Predicting things based on one or just a few aspects of a chart like sun/moon/ascendant is like predicting things based on race; a white person's experience may be superficially similar to another's but intersectionality shows us class, gender, etc form a web of individual life
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@brandonenorth
oh sure, but I can still predict a person's race better than random chance based on not too much additional data. it wouldn't be a perfect prediction, but I don't need perfect to make astrology convincing, just better than chance!
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Things arent so bad
@atlasontilt
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Astrology=religion. Some astrology people seem to think it’s more under the science category than the religious one, which is baseless. At least Christians admit they follow a ‘religion’ and some things are ‘taken on faith’. Astrology people sometime revert to ‘it’s science’ 🤯
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Isaac King 🔍
@IsaacKing314
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
In order for this experiment to avoid bias, I think you need to ask for their personality first, guess their sign, and then see how accurate your guesses are. Otherwise you're open to confirmation/selection bias on what aspects of their personality correlate to what sign.
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