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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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Michel -astrologizer-

@astrospeccion

Dec 27, 2021

Replying to

@Aella_Girl

, care to try to explain this? How do you rationalize these predictions of the 2020 pandemic, independently published years on advance? Mere lucky guesswork? Maybe, just maybe, you're plainly wrong on this. theastrologypodcast.com/2020/05/11/mis

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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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and

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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and

wouldn't be surprised if an astrologer or two predicted other upcoming events too. the question here isn't if they got big events right, (if you throw enough darts some will be right), but how many else you get wrong. What's your accuracy ratio?

Michel -astrologizer-

@astrospeccion

Dec 27, 2021

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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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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and

as in, does this astrologer person publish all predictions visibly and keep a running tally of what % of them are accurate? like are they open about all their misses as well as hits, without filtering or removing? if you have a link to this I wanna see

7:11 PM · Dec 27, 2021

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(and fwiw, I would expect a non astrologer to do a bit better than chance depending on what they're predicting, cause you can make predictions based on information in the world like the news or understanding human character)

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Michel -astrologizer-

@astrospeccion

Dec 27, 2021

Replying to

@Aella_Girl

I know someone who does that, regularly and very transparently, with financial-markets predictions, and has been able to make calls that cannot be explained by change or mere technical analysis. If you're interested, follow

Replying to

and

cool, I wonder how this compares to my very crypto obsessed friends who make predictions based on observing the market

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