Home › Forums › Science & tech › Could there be any sort of rational or scientific backing for “astrology”?
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December 30, 2020 at 9:42 am #54619
Anonymous
GuestCould there be any sort of rational backing for a phenomenon interpreted as "astrology"?
Of course the star sign woo-woo is complete bullshit, and I’m extremely, extremely skeptical that there’s anything to it in general –
But keeping an open mind does require considering the plausibility of there hypothetically being some kind of seasonality-correlated phenomenon that could cause people with close birthdays to be more likely to share certain traits
Like just to give a totally random example, maybe in a certain region there could be an increase in the concentration of a certain pollutant during March – April of every year, so maybe every baby in that region conceived around March – April could get particularly exposed to it at the earliest stage of development, causing babies born around December – January to all be more likely to exhibit some common traits caused by that exposure, or whatever
Is there any possible evidence for anything like that for any given area? I’m very doubtful, but it’s interesting to think about I suppose
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December 30, 2020 at 9:44 am #54620
Anonymous
GuestAll I know is that airheaded girls around me talk about it all the time like it’s a thing. I just ignore them.
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December 30, 2020 at 9:47 am #54621
Anonymous
GuestEven if there actually somehow were the slightest correlation, it’d still make all the believers just as annoying and dumb since they’re basically doing the equivalent of counting epicycles or thinking bacteria spontaneously form inside of things
Just curious if there could be any tie to reality whatsoever, because I’ve always considered it 100% bullshit and still do, but figured I should try to be open to the possibility that there could be some kind of birthday cluster effect in some cases
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December 30, 2020 at 11:36 am #54647
Anonymous
GuestPeople recognize patterns even where there are none. It’s why you see faces in cars
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December 31, 2020 at 8:31 am #54695
Anonymous
Guestthe position of the sun affects the light cast on the ground. this + positioning affects how things grow from water and moisture. its why plants grow with certain trunk movements and why their branches twist and turn depending on where they are planted
the moon also has affects. consider the growth of frost occurring more or less during full or crescent moons. consider the strength of tides
now the idea is that during germination the human is growing more or less this way or that way woke af on the position of the sun and the moon, as a result of their respective influences. how the ancients determined the 12 various influences and their archetypes, i have no idea atm, but the concept above should give you the idea of how it could easily be a possible science
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December 30, 2020 at 9:48 am #54622
Anonymous
Guestsounds extremely chaotic but the data is probably there if you look for it
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December 30, 2020 at 9:53 am #54623
Anonymous
GuestYeah, it’d be pretty hard to extract out even if there really is an effect
I suppose it’s possible there could even be some correlation between something simple like the average outdoor temperature during the first trimester, which could cause some average differences between babies conceived in winter and babies conceived in summer
I’d imagine probably someone has tried researching something like this before? Honestly too lazy to Google because it isn’t interesting enough to me to get caught down a rabbit hole investigating a lot of links
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December 30, 2020 at 8:14 pm #54664
Anonymous
GuestThis, it hasnt happened yet because how or why are you going to statistically evaluate an entire solar system over hundreds of thousands of years. With hundreds of billions of subjects you need to keep track of along with how they interact with each other.
Yeah, it’d be pretty hard to extract out even if there really is an effect
I suppose it’s possible there could even be some correlation between something simple like the average outdoor temperature during the first trimester, which could cause some average differences between babies conceived in winter and babies conceived in summer
I’d imagine probably someone has tried researching something like this before? Honestly too lazy to Google because it isn’t interesting enough to me to get caught down a rabbit hole investigating a lot of links
Honestly trying to measure the difference a few degrees of ambient temperature makes on a person is along the same lines of thinking a star system being closer or further away from you is making a difference.
Probably does make a difference but apart from trying to get laid why would anyone care
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December 31, 2020 at 11:12 pm #54707
Anonymous
Guest>apart from trying to get laid why would anyone care
unrelated but my favorite thing to do on tinder is lie about my star sign
>oh your a scorpio? hahaha i’m an aries we are a perfect match
or whatever it is
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December 30, 2020 at 10:21 am #54624
Anonymous
GuestNo, there is uncomprehencable amount of stars in the observable universe and it makes no sense for some of them to have an effect on biological makeup of not yet born children
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December 30, 2020 at 10:22 am #54625
Anonymous
GuestRead my actual post please
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December 30, 2020 at 10:41 am #54641
Anonymous
GuestThose stars or constellations have a negligible effect on the earth. I dont see any connections between them and pollutants
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December 30, 2020 at 10:58 am #54643
Anonymous
GuestThe astrological signs don’t line up with the constellations anymore anyway; they’re basically just old names for months.
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December 30, 2020 at 10:28 am #54626
Anonymous
GuestKary Mullis wrote a small article about this. He was convinced there was something to it since it stuck around for so long and seems to hold for enough people that it must work on some level, even if we have no idea why. It was an interesting read, as most of what Kary Mullis wrote tends to be.
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December 30, 2020 at 10:40 am #54627
Anonymous
GuestThat’s intriguing, though this is my first time hearing about this guy and he appears to be known for claiming HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, there’s no ozone depletion in the atmosphere, there’s no anthropogenic climate change, and these are all conspiracies perpetrated by governments, environmentalists, and scientists.
Sounds to me like he’s just a kneejerk contrarian or total schizo (so your typical LULZ poster), and I have no interest in reading anything from him
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December 30, 2020 at 11:37 am #54648
Anonymous
GuestHe’s more known for revolutionising biology like almost nobody else has since Watson and Crick, but yeah whatever gets your sense of intellectual superiority going.
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December 30, 2020 at 11:42 am #54650
Anonymous
GuestHe may very well have, and I’m in no way suggesting I’m at all intellectually superior. I just have no time to waste on crackpot insanity in fields he probably wasn’t an expert in. My issue is with his claims (HIV causing AIDS / ozone depletion / AGW are fake and conspiracies by the government and scientists), not his intellect or his achievements.
Watson of Watson and Crick has also done and said a ton of crazy things. It doesn’t invalidate his discovery; his discovery just doesn’t validate him as always right
I’ve read that and that does make sense, but I think that’s kind of a different thing. But, yes, same general principle
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December 30, 2020 at 12:17 pm #54656
Anonymous
Guestyou are asking about astrology. there is no such thing as someone who is an expert in astrology
the best someone can do is offer someone who is clearly smart, and who has some unusual ideas, and this was posted as nothing more than a curios comment, but you immediately dismissed him as a "schizo" for being a proponent of astrology
so you have an issue of wanting to sincerely discuss a fringe idea, but you also want to call people with fringe ideas schizos-
December 30, 2020 at 12:25 pm #54660
Anonymous
Guest>but you immediately dismissed him as a "schizo" for being a proponent of astrology
??? No, not at all. In fact the remark about him hypothesizingthat astrology could be a projection of a real phenomenon (which is also what my OP is asking/hypothesizing) sounds totally believable.I’m not at all judging him for his belief on astrology. I’m solely judging his claims that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, that ozone depletion in the atmosphere isn’t real, that AGW isn’t real, and that additionally all three are conspiracies propagated by governments and scientists. Those, and only those, to me indicate he holds several delusional beliefs.
I was trying to be explicit to prevent this but I might have done a poor job wording the OP
I’m very much saying I don’t buy the celestial object hypothesis whatsoever. If this effect exists, celestial object position is almost certainly just a coincidental confounder, because all recurring seasonal things (like number of ice cream trucks near you) would be confounders.
I’m asking first if the effect exists at all (correlation between birth date and average personality traits) and second what are some possible things that could maybe contribute. In another post I offered the possibility of things like seasonal cycles of pollutants, weather, temperature, something in the atmosphere or local air, ionizing radiation, noise pollution, sun/light/UV, direction/exposure/scattering, volcano activity, electromagnetic forces, differences in nutrients and compounds of plants a mother eats woke af on when the plant was grown/harvested, and potentially dozens or hundreds of other things.
I honestly doubt the effect even exists at all or if it does my guess is it’s extremely small and mostly explained by weather or something. I just find it an interesting discussion
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December 30, 2020 at 10:41 am #54640
Anonymous
GuestSomething psychological, like a placebo effect, perhaps?
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December 30, 2020 at 10:49 am #54642
Anonymous
GuestI’m sure that’s a massive part of it, but I’m asking if there could possibly be any non-placebo part of it. I think it’s unlikely but I’m just curious
I’m not talking about stars at all though, I’m talking about the "end result" of people having supposed "birth signs".
That is, astrology people claim that all people born in a certain month range are a Pisces or Leo or whatever, and that people in such a group all tend to be more likely to have certain traits or whatever
I know full well that *if* that birthday correlation somehow happens to be true it would have absolutely nothing to do with celestial objects
I’m just asking about any possible evidence that that observation (clusters of traits correlated with birth months) could actually be true, and if so how
If it actually were true, it would at least redeem them to the extent that they’re experiencing a true phenomenon and not all just 100% falling victim to placebo, even if they’re totally wrong about the root cause of it, kind of like how scientists used to believe diseases came from germs but that the germs just spontaneously appeared out of thin air. They were observing a real thing, but just didn’t understand the fundamental origin and came up with a mythological one instead
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December 30, 2020 at 11:20 am #54644
Anonymous
GuestYes, i think that you have a right perspective on that. I think that it has nothing to do with genetics, but it’s plausible that some cyclical seasonal phenomena affect traits of people that grow up. It can also be a social effect. Something like proffesional hockey players are born in first months of a year, because they are bigger than those from the end of a year and progress further thanks to that advantage
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December 30, 2020 at 11:23 am #54645
Anonymous
GuestI’ve heard a few temperature and weather related theories in this vein.
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December 30, 2020 at 11:35 am #54646
Anonymous
GuestIm a rational person, studying physics, used to argue with my mom that astrology is bullshit. But in the last few years, I started thinking. There is no law that forbids stars from setting your path upon your birth. The whole natal chart thing is woke af of where the stars were located, and in what degree, on your birth day, which gives the system more complexity than just "aquarius are usually humble ;))" and can somewhat have credibility. You see, we all know gravity and magnetic forces are never equal to zero, so technically these forces do work on humans, even though the force is extremely weak. These forces could definitely impact your life, considering the fact that they begin working differently (at a different time) on every persons birth. So these forces could direct your life, and maybe even forces we haven’t discovered yet. Anyway, my point is that we can’t prove astrology wrong. I always wanted to perform a statistical experiment, relating personality to birth date. I might as well just conduct it in my uni after corona is over.
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December 30, 2020 at 11:54 am #54652
Anonymous
GuestAnd how this miniscule gravity would impact human behavior? Yes, those stars are somewhat connected to earth but their impact is almost nothing. Because of that, their impact on something as specific as human behavior should be nothing.
We probably cannot prove it wrong, but if you study phisics then you know that that doesnt mean a thing.-
December 30, 2020 at 12:04 pm #54653
Anonymous
GuestWhat if it does mean a thing? What if these forces do somehow interact with the psyche? What if as I said, there are more forces the planets around us project on us? It’s fascinating to think about, but we’re quite far from experimenting in this field, we don’t have the technology nor the mind set for these things. Yet. Statistical experiments will have to do for now.
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December 30, 2020 at 12:13 pm #54655
Anonymous
GuestYou should be able to calculate a good approximation of the gravitational force exerted by any celestial object on any human at any given time
But if you’re just saying "well what if there’s some other long-distance force that isn’t any of the four known forces", we’re kind of in the "what if there’s an invisible sky dragon" territory. It’s just not scientific. It’s worth being open to the possibility of more forces, but in this case if you assume that there is a birth date-personality correlation, it makes far, far more sense that there’s something local to the Earth (perhaps also the moon) that’s seasonal and that’s causing some of those correlations.
Star positions also correlate seasonally, but so do ice cream trucks. If the phenomenon is true it’s like saying your personality is determined by how far away the closest ice cream truck is from you when you’re born. It’s just a confounder which might closely correlate but of course it would correlate, because all recurring seasonal things will correlate.
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December 31, 2020 at 8:59 am #54699
Anonymous
Guest>You should be able to
Stop it, Kurisu.
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December 30, 2020 at 12:08 pm #54654
Anonymous
Guest> There is no law that forbids stars from setting your path upon your birth. The whole natal chart thing is woke af of where the stars were located, and in what degree, on your birth day, which gives the system more complexity than just "aquarius are usually humble ;))" and can somewhat have credibility. You see, we all know gravity and magnetic forces are never equal to zero, so technically these forces do work on humans, even though the force is extremely weak.
It’s just not plausible. Gravity follows an inverse square law. Consider how far away those stars are; Jupiter and the moon affect you far more strongly, and even those are essentially unnoticeable.>I always wanted to perform a statistical experiment, relating personality to birth date. I might as well just conduct it in my uni after corona is over.
If an experiment did find a correlation between some personality traits and birth date, untangling the actual causes is the real question.It could be partly explained by somewhat predictably recurring seasonal weather, temperature, something in the atmosphere or local air, ionizing radiation, noise pollution, sun/light/UV direction/exposure/scattering, volcano activity, electromagnetic forces, differences in nutrients and compounds of plants a mother eats woke af on when the plant was grown/harvested, and probably tons of other things that would be really hard to account for
That’s why I made this thread. Not to sound like an poopyhole but I’m not interested in humoring the original idea of astrology (star location at birth somehow influencing personality). If the birth date-personality correlation is sometimes real, then star position would be a totally unrelated confounder. I think there’s just no chance.
The question is first determining if this correlation really does exist at all, and if so, secondly sussing out all the things that could possibly contribute to it, and then thirdly ideally actually proving some of the causation
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December 30, 2020 at 12:27 pm #54661
Anonymous
Guest>I think there’s just no chance.
Hey you talked about astrology, I gave you my take. External factors regarding earth are more probable candidates for influencing a person since birth obviously, I’m only saying "what if".But if you’re just saying "well what if there’s some other long-distance force that isn’t any of the four known forces", we’re kind of in the "what if there’s an invisible sky dragon" territory. It’s just not scientific. It’s worth being open to the possibility of more forces, but in this case if you assume that there is a birth date-personality correlation, it makes far, far more sense that there’s something local to the Earth (perhaps also the moon) that’s seasonal and that’s causing some of those correlations.
Star positions also correlate seasonally, but so do ice cream trucks. If the phenomenon is true it’s like saying your personality is determined by how far away the closest ice cream truck is from you when you’re born. It’s just a confounder which might closely correlate but of course it would correlate, because all recurring seasonal things will correlate.
>we’re kind of in the "what if there’s an invisible sky dragon" territory
Youd be extremely naive to think these four fundamental forces are all there is. Ive no proof that there is more, but ita clear there is. Humanity has only begun discovering reality, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are 50 more layers(dimensions) to the universe with forces interacting between them, unseen in some dimensions but affecting matter and energy nonetheless. Why is C the "universal speed limit"? Only time will tell.
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December 31, 2020 at 8:51 am #54697
Anonymous
Guest>Anyway, my point is that we can’t prove astrology wrong
We also can’t prove that Jesus was not the son of God. Should I go get baptized and convert to Christianity right away?-
January 1, 2021 at 6:38 am #54708
Anonymous
Guest>We also can’t prove that Jesus was not the son of God.
Yes, we can.
>Should I go get baptized and convert to Christianity right away?
Yes, you should.
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December 31, 2020 at 8:52 am #54698
Anonymous
Guest>I might as well just conduct it in my uni after corona is over
>after corona is over
>over
My sweet summer child…
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December 30, 2020 at 11:41 am #54649
Anonymous
Guestlike the thing where being born early in the school year gives you an advantage over those born later than you which accumulate over you formative years?
you should read a summary of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers to get the general idea -
December 30, 2020 at 11:52 am #54651
Anonymous
GuestThere’s trends in birthdates being higher with a 9 month lag after cold months and Christmas.
Plausible that common early life experiences for cavemen like your birthday always sucks because it’s cold and there’s no food would affect developing personality.-
December 30, 2020 at 9:18 pm #54667
Anonymous
Guest>There’s trends in birthdates being higher with a 9 month lag after cold months and Christmas
That’s because shitloads of people spend their New Year’s Eve drinking and freaking.
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December 30, 2020 at 12:18 pm #54657
Anonymous
Guest>Could there be any sort of rational backing for a phenomenon interpreted as "astrology"?
Combined gravity effects of planets influencing biological life somehow, but not as traditional astrology imagines it. The effect would probably be very small.-
December 30, 2020 at 9:40 pm #54669
Anonymous
GuestYou experience more gravitational interaction with a household sized appliance that just happened to be in the room or a vehicle passing by the hospital you were born in than the stars in constellations
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December 30, 2020 at 12:20 pm #54658
Anonymous
Guest>maybe in a certain region there could be an increase in the concentration of a certain pollutant during March – April
this is a lot more probable and could systematically affect newborns in a certain stage of development -
December 30, 2020 at 12:21 pm #54659
Anonymous
Guestthe most influential factor in my opinion is the amount of sunlight that the newborn receives in the first months after birth, and the fact that summer/winter activities of the families are different and could influence the neural development of a newborn.
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December 30, 2020 at 12:33 pm #54662
Anonymous
GuestYeah, this would be up there on my list of possible factors, if it’s real. I’ve been reading more and more research about how simple presence of sunlight exposure – even just a few minutes every day – drives a ton of neurological processes. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if more northern regions like Norway might have some proportion of the population with a genetic adaptation that requires less of it, or something
>Hey you talked about astrology, I gave you my take. External factors regarding earth are more probable candidates for influencing a person since birth obviously, I’m only saying "what if".
I’m open to it, but there are different probabilities, here, and we know that things that are very far away have an incredibly small gravitational influence. Given we don’t>Youd be extremely naive to think these four fundamental forces are all there is. Ive no proof that there is more, but ita clear there is. Humanity has only begun discovering reality, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are 50 more layers(dimensions) to the universe with forces interacting between them, unseen in some dimensions but affecting matter and energy nonetheless.
I think there may be more, but even if there are, we would probably also expect them to be very weak or essentially zero over incredibly long distances (like stars in distant galaxies)It’s just multiplying so many low probabilities. First that there is such a force, second that stars in distant galaxies exert it to a real degree on us, and third that this is stronger than all of the possible local seasonal factors
I’m open to the idea of there being many more layers to reality we currently have no clue about, but Occam’s razor here still strongly points to the idea that the revolution of the Earth around the sun resulting in stars appearing to be in different places is a simple confounding variable just like every other thing out there that cycles on an annual fashion
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December 30, 2020 at 12:45 pm #54663
Anonymous
GuestRan out of space for this post, but basically what I’m trying to say is if you assume the concept of astrology had never existed but people still observed this kind of rough birth month – personality correlation effect, absolutely no one would start to assume that distant stars are causing it, just as no one would start to assume that ice cream trucks or what sports are being played outside are causing it.
There’s just no reason whatsoever to jump to those things. They just happen to coincide because all things that cycle annually will coincide. The only reason the whole star thing is involved at all is because hundreds of years ago, outside of the birth date thing, people had lots of elaborate and wrong theories about the cosmos.
Something that’s maybe a bit more plausible is that there’s some other kind of directional force in the universe, besides the Sun’s radiation and unrelated to our perspective of relative star positions, which hits different parts of the Earth differently at different times of year and which affects developing fetuses or infants. In that case astrology would be slightly vindicated to an extent
But I think the specific distant-star idea is just so, so improbable. It’s not impossible but it’s like the lowest thing I’d put on the list, if you think about what it actually physically means when a star "moves" in the sky from our perspective in the context of the Earth revolving around the Sun.
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December 30, 2020 at 9:10 pm #54665
Anonymous
GuestAstrology is passed across as a meme and suffers from many dead and unfruitful branches. Above all it is mnemonic system attached to a system of categories about human behavior. As soon as you realize that an *starsign* doesn’t need to be born within *starsign.dates* everything else makes a lot more sense. It is descriptive and not prescriptive. Continuing, the prescience of astrology is a thousand years and more of tomfoolery. What is offered is a very methodical way of obtaining perspective as celestial bodies regularly move about and everyday is offers a new consideration of categorical relationships. A primitive way of tuning the social antanae.
I don’t study astrology at all, but I drew the conclusions when I started considering the merits of enneagrams. I don’t really know how complete astrology is in terms of categorizing behavior. Perhaps it is way off mark there as well.
One question I’d like to find the answer to if I had literally nothing else to do: how many ancient myths are just a way to remember how to walk a thousand miles from one city to another? I get a feeling that number is close to 100%.
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December 30, 2020 at 9:15 pm #54666
Anonymous
GuestOne of the major astrology companies has a job posted for software developer. The pay and benefits are really good and the expected technology stack is something I’m experienced with. They have good ratings on Glassdoor. But it’s astrology. Other than that, it seems like it would be a great job but I might have to lie to everyone about what I do for living.
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December 30, 2020 at 9:42 pm #54670
Anonymous
GuestJust tell them you’re a developer for a specialist entertainment company, you wouldn’t be lying
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December 30, 2020 at 9:38 pm #54668
Anonymous
GuestThe relative age effect
Despite being a long-established and easily explained phenomena, unaware astrologers to this day still mention "most athletes are so-and-so sign ergo astrology must be legit" -
December 30, 2020 at 11:26 pm #54671
Anonymous
GuestDont think so bro
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December 31, 2020 at 3:01 am #54672
Anonymous
GuestA friend once made an observation that people born around the same time of the year will likely have similar experiences at about the same times.
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December 31, 2020 at 3:11 am #54673
Anonymous
GuestI am a hobbyist astronomer, and I find astrology a fun mental model to attach to an already great showing. My perspective on astrology is always growing. I don’t see it as a method of truth telling but as an exercise in thought. For instance, Jupiter lasts in each constellation for nearly a year, making a full ~12 year revolution. It would then, theoretically manifest itself in yearly differences whereas Saturn would be 2-3 year differences and higher up for the higher up and much less for the inner planets. It’s like a cosmic clock with extra hands. Of course, I am not sure to prohpetize truth. I just enjoy my fantasy along with my science, know how to keep them separate, and find astronomy and astrology by extension a huge expanse of knowledge to explore.
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December 31, 2020 at 3:19 am #54674
Anonymous
GuestTestosterone varies by season, mental illness is associated with season of birth with that as mechanism. See Ulrich Tran, geschwind & galaburda
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December 31, 2020 at 3:31 am #54675
Anonymous
GuestThe way I look at it is that certain aspects of nature have a cyclical nature, people in the past used the stars and planets to time these cycles and make some sort of sense out of the universe.
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December 31, 2020 at 5:47 am #54676
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December 31, 2020 at 7:33 am #54677
Anonymous
GuestIf you lived in a simulated reality where the programmer decided that the position of stars had a direct effect on your life,
How would you disprove it anon?-
December 31, 2020 at 7:36 am #54678
Anonymous
GuestAlso, you literally cannot say that woo-woo star sign is complete bullshit. You have no way to disprove or prove it. Nothing is certain except for …
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December 31, 2020 at 8:38 am #54696
Anonymous
GuestI don’t remember where I read it, but apparently Jung had an idea like yours concerning astrology, namely that it had to do with time cycles rather than with the stars themselves, and the stars simply happened to be some kind of natural clock to keep track of those cycles. Which is why he thought that the axial precession didn’t matter much and it was okay to still pretend that the stars were in the same position as they were during the days of Ptolemy, since the purpose of astrology is merely to keep track of time rather than follow the real movement of the stars.
That being said, Jung also believed in all kinds of supernatural bullshit, so you shouldn’t listen to him without more than a grain of salt.
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December 31, 2020 at 9:04 am #54700
Anonymous
GuestAround 75% of women believe in this bullshit while around 90% of men don’t.
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December 31, 2020 at 11:03 pm #54705
Anonymous
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December 31, 2020 at 11:09 pm #54706
Anonymous
Guestalso /thread
this btfo’d every astrology scrote
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