Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
I unapologetically view people who literally believe the stars/planets can predict unrelated things on earth as uniquely bad at thinking (moreso than many other strange beliefs) But if you don't literally believe this, then astrology seems like it could be really cool. 1/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@astrospeccion
when I was a child, I watched a documentary about the Bible code, where if you arrange all the letters in a Bible on a grid, you can find word clusters that predicted terrible events. they had several uncanny, convincing examples
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
and
@astrospeccion
turns out if you have a massive random generation of words, you can easily go through and pick out the ones that are significant. this even happens in science all the time, with p-hacking. get a ton of astrologers making a ton of predictions, totally unsurprised some are right
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Michel -astrologizer-
@astrospeccion
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
That's a nice way of framing the question, but it's also fallacious. Let's say accuracy is 1%. If that 1% success rate is based on a prediction detailed enough that it cannot be explained by mere chance, there's some undeniable predictive power in the technique.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@astrospeccion
it's still a ratio! the Bible code had words in the shape of a rocket, the words were "challenger" and "catastrophe " and "stars" or whatever. super specific, super unlikely. If you have enough darts, it *can* be explained by random chance. there's an easy way to check tho
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mks
@milkbutcher
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
and
@astrospeccion
It’s true astrologers often make dramatic predictions that miss, but 2020 was unanimously seen as a year for something big and bad. Similar for this coming year, and 2027-2028 in the US. If these natural experiments come up false I’d drop astrology and encourage others to as well