this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Astrology is really dumb. I do have one curiosity with it. It's a big deal for hockey players to be born early in the year to the point you find fewer pros born in December and in the later months compared to January through March born hockey professionals.
One other thing, kids have birthdays every year and if they have their parties outside that means some kids are having snowy birthday parties and others are having sunny birthdays and plenty of crossover. The kinds of interactions you have with your friends will be slightly impacted* by how much outdoor gear you have to wear, etc. (*maybe imperceptibly)
But the point is there are at least two possible differences that come depending on which month you're born in. What if there are like a hundred of them and astrology is a really terrible way of trying to figure that out? Now I realize it's not so maybe a better question is I wonder if there is any version of birth month based assessments, correlations, or analyses that might be fruitful or useful in some way or another.
Ok you seem genuienly curious here, lemme try.
So, yes, you are correct that the season you are born in will slightly effect the number of seasons a kid experiences.
But uh... what if you are born in a tropical monsoon climate that has no winter?
What if you are born in the other hemisphere, where the seasons are inverted?
What if you can't afford a house, so you don't have a yard for parties, don't live near a park... or hockey rink?
And the biggest one: what do the actual stars have to do with this?
Say earth and the whole solar system are poofed out of the Milky Way, and into Andromeda. Solar system remains stable, all orbits the same, the Sun's massive solar wind is strong enough to protect us from the ambient radiation of wherever we end up.
Seasons will be exactly the same. Stars will be dramatically different. ... Do you think the stars being different would change... anything?
Beyond that, even back here on normal, real Earth, in the Milky Way... most Eastern astrology is based on the year you are born in. Not the month.
And also, throughout history.... various cultures have kept a calendar, kept track of time... in many different ways. Solar calendars. Lunar calendars. Calendars based on the reigns of Emperors or Dynasties, calendars based off of mythical/religious stories for the origin of the universe/planet.
They also have not all recognized the same constellation patterns... as what we now recognize them as.
If you're in the Southern hemisphere... you can't even see many of the ones we see in the North.
...
You can try and number crunch statistical correlations between every possible variable.
Sometimes this can lead to an insight.
But to nail down why that correlation exists, to actually discover something true and useful... you also have to provide a causal mechanism that makes sense.
The object close enough to meaningfully directly affect Earth is the Moon. It causes tides, for example, alters many animal behaviors.
The only other thing is the Sun, of course, which gives the planet light and energy.
Nothing else inside of or outside of our solar system has any mechanism of directly impacting life on Earth in a regular, noticeable way...
... unless we get astounsingly unlucky and get hit by the radiation from a magnetar we somehow haven't noticed yet, or something absurd like that.
I forgot the biggest laugh of them all. This YouTube astrology dude explains some different types of astrology, including one he called mundane astrology. He explained mundane astrologers attempt to explain entire society's behaviors and fates using the stars or astrology or whatever. And the example that he gave was COVID. And also he brought up, believe it or not, elections. And said that there's an election astrology.
So I think there are only three possibilities.
One is that astrology, including election astrology, is super effective. And a handful of people can do it. And they're all billionaires.
Scenario two, the same scenario, except election astrologers don't like to mix money with their craft. And that's why we don't know about the 30th through 50th richest people on the planet, all being astrologers, who enjoy the betting markets, the prediction markets.
Scenario three is that we don't see billionaire astrologers. Not because they are too ethical to mix money with sky gazing (or whatever it is), but because they're making it all up.
So to the astrologers out there, who amongst you are billionaires thanks to owning the prediction markets every day or every election cycle? Or what kind of ethical code prevents election astrologers from using prediction markets?
I mean, when I was learning statistics and econometrics, half of my professors stressed the limitations of various kinds of mathematical predictive models... by saying that we don't want to go from professionals to turning into astrologers.
Of course, this doesn't stop a lot of day trader dude bros and more recently crypto day trader dude bros from convincing themselves they've cracked the code...
But the point here is: Actual statisticians literally use 'astrologer' as a derisive slur.
And they are correct to do so, imo, lol.
Awesome, I didn’t reply yesterday because I had too much to say so here is a simple thank you to avert a common never-reply scenario :-)
Well, just a quick dictation, too. Apparently I forgot that stars were involved with astrology at all, so I slapped my forehead and searched YouTube. And I was hoping to find a skeptic who steel-manned astrology, but that would be pretty odd to spend your time doing such a thing if you were a skeptic. Unless, of course, it was teeing up an explanation for a teardown. But anyway, I listened to some goofball talking super seriously about astrology, and he made a claim about celebrity star charts and said that Iron Man, Robert Downey Juney, had foreseen that he would have a big change in his life. And then, sure enough, Iron Man came out and changed his career. Wow, great job, astrology. You nailed it. Once energy is just about free, and so is compute, it would be pretty easy to disprove that line of thinking by feeding the world's celebrities into a system and analyzing all of their little charts. Anyway, I was only thinking about birth months and the idea of the positions of balls of gas having meaningful impacts on all of our lives is quite the stretch. Please excuse the lack of editing here. Thank you.
LOL.
Astrology, ultimately etymylogically derives from... astron, meaning 'star' in Greek.
It literally means 'study of the stars'.
hahahah!
But uh yeah, it is essentially impossible to 'steel man' astrology, because pretty much every practitioner of it has their own cust version of it, similar to... how one is supposed to use or read Tarot cards.
Then you've got a whole cottage industry of cranks, cranking out either 100% or 90% made up bullshit as their own spin on how astrology 'works'.
Like, historically, you can trace various sort of family trees of actual astrological doctrines, but in the last 50 years, so many people have made up so much nonsense that you basically have to take any particular astrologer and ask them what they believe, because they won't agree with another one, or they'll just tell you that part of astrology is that it is a personal, mystical experience and practice, so there will be 'reasonable variation of opinion' amongst 'experts'.
It is delusional narcissist nonsense that functions as an identity for people who have not otherwise managed to build or acquire one.
There are a lot of similarities between, and sometimes direct crossover with, actual literal cult leaders, and 'very serious' astrologers.