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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:

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

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.

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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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