Richard Dawkins has stirred up a new nest of critics, and they’re actually getting space in the media. This time, it’s an astrologer complaining about those damned skeptics.
Evidently hoping to prove astrologers are know-nothings, Dawkins’ interview started with a lengthy grilling about astronomy – the precession of the equinoxes, sidereal and tropical zodiacs, Kuiper Belt objects. There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that’s eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology’s basic personality types number 1,728.
Ooooh, 1,728. That certainly sounds precise and scientific and all that … of course, the real question is whether these carefully enumerated types correspond to actual personality types, and whether date and hour and place of birth impose that kind of disposition on people. And the answer is no. I could add another arbitrary signifier to his list — say, “were you born at or below sea level, or above sea level?” — and double the number of types assigned by astrology to 3,456 (or more if I start subdividing the altitude!), but it’s all utterly meaningless without a mechanism or without replicable evidence.
Like many woo-woo crackpots, there’s no brand of nonsense this fellow won’t try to defend. Obviously, hard-nosed skeptics must criticize the unknown because it doesn’t conform to their paradigms.
Homeopathy and acupuncture are particularly repellent since they work through mechanisms unknown to the laws of physics.
Actually, I think homeopathy and acupuncture are repellent because they don’t work.
Oh, well. Critiqued by theologians, now by astrologers … there really isn’t much difference in the collection of clowns that gather to throw marshmallows, is there?
No, it isn’t. Myers-Briggs uses four binary categories for a total of 16 possible results.
Evidently hoping to prove astrologers are know-nothings….
No, the implication is not that astrologers know nothing, it’s just that the stuff they know is bullshit.
Phrenology was well-studied by experts in its time, with anatomical charts, formulae, and everything. It was certainly not a field for know-nothings. However, the only personality trait that could be reliably divined from the bumps on the head is clumsiness.
Yet another article titled “The Dawkins Delusion”…Do people still think that title is somehow clever?
Shoot, he’s as well-qualified as most of the others going after Dawkins; his profession is just less respectable, that’s all. And I’m not sure that acupuncture is complete BS – it’s that the majority of the claims made for it are.
Exactly, Martin. And I’ve found that the MB test is incredibly accurate. So far anyone I know that has been tested has said it’s been probably 95-99% accurate.
But that astrology test is just ridiculous. Not only because of the amount of personality types, but those questions… bleh. I can’t imagine what on Earth the difference would make if I was born above, below, or, heck, AT water level.
(O)(O)
Isn’t the Myers-Briggs personality test pseudoscience? If so, does this guy want to imply that astrology is 432 times more cranky than the personality test? Sounds about right, actually…
This really nullifies the entire article, if nothing else does.
Ironically enough, the ladies who gave us Myers-Briggs were disciples of Jung, who loved astrology and the Tarot. In fact, the basic structure of MB (particularly the four binaries and their sub-structures) was probably taken from the four cardinal signs of astrology (or the four suits of the Tarot deck, with the Court cards being the sub-types).
I haven’t yet decided whether your MB type reveals any deep truth about your psychology, or merely tells you how you answered the MB test. But even if it’s only the latter, deriving personality “type” fom questions about your subjective feelings and preferences is (pardon the pun) light-years more informative than deriving it fron the positions of various planets and stars at the moment you were born.
(I’m INTP, BTW)
MBTI has 16, not 4, types. And the MBTI is used by commerce, but that doesn’t mean it’s been accepted as scientific, either (mainly because it hasn’t been). Still, INTJ tells you a lot more about me than “Capricorn”, apart from my affinity for bock lagers.
There’s just as much evidence for astrology’s efficacy as there is for that of Christianity. They both depend on faith in the supernatural and support the notion that some force lurking in the Heavens is controlling our every whim. It’s all a ruse for the weak-minded … but it’s still kinda fun to watch from afar.
Actually, I think you may have overstated the case against both acupuncture and homeopathy. To date, while homeopathy hasn’t survived any reputable study I know of, the evidence concerning acupuncture is still teetering both ways. Some studies seem to indicate efficacy in certain situations, at least as much as aspirin. I rather doubt that any discovered efficacy will be due to body meridians, but there are currently attempts to explain why it seems to work in limited circumstances.
No wonder he’s so upset. I just ran his name through and determined his number is 3:
The Myers-Briggs test touches on one of my peeves, personality testing. I’ve been appalled for years that it’s accepted as science, when in reality no personality test has ever been proven to be reliable or valid. I recently read “The Cult of Personality Testing”, which did a good job of summarizing the many attempts to capture all of human nature in a bottle.
IIRC, the MB puts you on a continuum of preferences, it doesn’t pigeon-hole you into absolutes. For example, I am ISTJ, but the S and J are close to the 50-50 line. So I supposedly have little problem going back and forth from S – N and J – P, but I am hard over I, so have a hella hard time being the gregarious E. It corresponds, somewhat. FWIW.
If astrology is so durned wonderful, why haven’t they started applying GPS to it? And why don’t the serious astrologers criticize the obviously trashy ones in the daily paper (really, they don’t apply any birth location data or ephemeris data, since they are independent of birth year)? Aren’t those hacks giving astrology a bad name?
/Nelson HAha
Last, I suppose the dowsing faithful will enter the fray, since the esteemed astrologer slammed them.
Any scale which claims that the number of basic personality traits or types is larger than 50, let alone 1,728, is clearly out of touch with reality – although I can hardly say say that’s a very surprising characteristic of anything coming from an astrologist.
If by “reliable” you mean “produces repeatable results”, then many personality tests are reliable. If by “valid” you mean “produce useful information about the likely behaviour of a person”, then while I can’t vouch for the Myers-Briggs, there is certainly plenty of research showing the utility of other personality measures, such as the NEO.
People generally behave fairly reliably in various situations, and different people will behave differently. This is essentially all that is meant by “personality” — it isn’t an attempt to dehumanize or “bottle” human nature.
PZ, please ban wÒÓ†. (grounds: repeated stupidity)
And I’ve found that the MB test is incredibly accurate. So far anyone I know that has been tested has said it’s been probably 95-99% accurate.
Careful, Tom: people say the same sort of thing about their astrological “types”, too. Self-reporting is not very reliable about this sort of thing.
Of course, I have to ask the further question: accurate about what? The MB type descriptions basically tell you how you answered the questions, so they could hardly be too far off, could they? Might as well devise a test to sort people into the traditional “four humours” types (as in fact Tim LaHaye’s ministry did some years ago), or into the four Hogwart’s houses (as I’m sure someone already has). The important question is: does your “type” (derived from whatever taxonomy) tell you anything beyond what you already knew, or the specific details of the questions themselves?
The number of possible basic personality traits is as infinite as the creativity of the test inventors. To me, all personality tests are sadly lacking, and often as bogus as astrology or phrenology. I don’t have electronic text from books on the subject, but Wikipedia has a fairly good exposition of the objections to the Myers-Briggs. Among other things, Jung’s theories were never tested, and the entire MB system was almost entirely designed by two women with no scientific training at all. Reliability is particularly poor, and the few studies done on the Myers-Briggs show clear that the “traits” will actually rise and fall unpredictably. Personality tests are proof that modern industrial populations are every bit as susceptible to pseudoscience as Medieval peasants ever were. Ask any HR professional today and they will probably proclaim personality tests to be valuable assets in hiring, when in reality they are unreliable and so flawed that using Tarot cards would yield as much good data.
wÒÓ† stays.
Typologists like to associate “melancholic” with the NT group.
cue: “Clown Strike” (Elvis Costello)
(reaching for putty nose)
That’s right, kids! Check out my shoes! (honk honk)
Aw, people, although I haven’t even read the alleged astrologer’s piece, I can tell it’s a parody. He/she spelled “Myers” correctly!
It’s a dangerou slippery slope. First you believe in one Mid-Eastern woo about stars, next thing you know, you’re believing in some other Mid-Eastern woo that has some myth about an all-powerful Sky JuJu.
Uhhh…I don’t understand. The guy has posted like 10-20 times the same post which has no content other than uses parentheses and periods to look like this: (O)(O), and then it links to a page on boobies (the bird). You think this is worth keeping?
Accumulate enough inane detritus like that on a blog comments community and smart cool people get turned off. The internet has enough crap on it already. Let’s not let good things get MySpace-ified by inane crap, OK?
heh. when I was at Microsoft, they had us take this kind of test, except the categories were different (probably, we suspected, to avoid nastygrams from the Myers-Briggs copyright lawyers).
I don’t remember all four categories, but “Artistic”, “Technical”, and “Driver” are the ones I remember. We were rated along two axes, so you might be “Driver Technical” or “Technical Artistic” or whatever.
One of our “Driver Driver”s began referring to his designation as “Asshole Asshole”, and that stuck, at least in our group.
i sometimes wonder if there might be a grain of truth in astrological sign stereotypes, based on climate conditions during formative months in development (i started thinking this way when i noticed that i shared some similarities with other people i knew who had september birthdays). apparently no evidence of this has been found. however, there appears to be a significant association with suicidal ideation (see Stack & Lester, 1988). i don’t know if that’s been replicated or not.
it’s actually not hard to imagine that if your first few months of awareness occur in the winter, when outside is unliveable and inside is toasty warm, it might affect you on a subconscious level. but i guess we’d expect a big effect in propensity for outdoor activities or something else that we’d have definitively documented by now.
Homeopathy didn’t work for me, but I had my first acupuncture session as part of a larger PT session last Friday, and it seemed to help a lot. The trick is, it needs to be in conjunction with other methods, and be administered by someone who actually knows what they’re doing (my PT friend is an expert in at least a dozen different PT techniques). That said, half the needles hurt going in and coming out so it’s not something I’d likely try again.
“i sometimes wonder if there might be a grain of truth in astrological sign stereotypes, based on climate conditions during formative months in development”
Then it would only work in one region of the world – it would be opposite int he wouthern hemsiphere and completely different in the torpics.
“Actually, I think you may have overstated the case against both acupuncture” I agree, acupuncture may have some pain relief benefits – aftera all they have done operations under it without the patient screaming (this could also be suggestion). Though as an entire medical system it is a failure.
Darn it, PZ, you’re such a Pisces!
I agree, Woot needs to go. Would you put up with other posters not contributing in any way to the conversation with inane crap?
As for Accupuncture, Elayne. If it was used in conjunction with other methods how do you know it wasn’t one of those other methods working and not the AP?
I thought that WOO’s statement was a comment on the vapidity of the astrologers critique. But regardless, its a 6 character statement, and I’m not bothered by it. What I am bothered by is someone trying to get another commenter banned, even after the blogs owner has said he won’t.
As for astrology, I’m sure better tests for validity have been determined, but I think if you took a random sampling of people and sat them down with an astrologer for ten minutes or so, and had the astrologer ask them questions to determine their personality traits, and then see if the astrologer can determine the persons sign. My guess is that they could get about 1 in 12 right.
You know, I’m always worry that I obsess too much with arguments in cyberspace.
But after reading the link provided by Dustin (#22), I feel completely normal. Dustin’s right: wÒÓ† has earned a little slack. Perhaps his outbursts of juvenilia here is a way of letting off steam from his marathon slugfest with JAD.
Speaking of which, I knew the latter was a crank, but 900+ posts of insults and non-sequeturs? Is this a record? Has someone contacted Guinness?
Speaking of the Tarot-reading subset of all such fortune-telling frauds, that was the source of the piece of damning footage which we are not now going to be permitted to see.
“For scientism, however, personal experience is not admissible. Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials.”
Reminds me of Mr. Burns criticizing Martin’s nuclear power plant model that actually generated power. “So cold and sterile. Where’s the heart?”
And where’s the pixie dust?
Scott Hatfield, OM:
I’m not much of a drinker, but that much crankery would propel me towards a beer.
You overstate the case against acupunture. Its effective for treating a lot of pain. That doesnt mean that meridans exist or that an acupunturist is manipulating chi. But it is proven to reduce certain kinds of pain. If I had a pinched nerve or something, I’d feel good choosing acupunture.
Ok then, the non-intelligence of woot stays, some of us leave.
See ya.
Have you seen the volume of inane crap that gets posted here?
(I’m not singling anyone out, and sometimes I contribute to the inane crap myself. )
I’ve emailed woot, and he’s a reasonable fellow. I’m not going to evict someone for posting something that’s short and harmless, if rather too repetitive, but you could try asking nicely that he limit the posting a little bit.
I think Woot’s cute, for what it’s worth….
My horospcope for today says to change my routine, so I’m going to resist the impusle to comment.
As the Moon prepares to move out of your second house you may find yourself reflecting deeply on your relationship to your day to day lifestyle. This is a great time to make changes in your routine in order to breathe some new life and enthusiasm into the way you look at your world.
On the other hand, I’m told by another horoscope site:
You’re feeling pretty good about a recent development, and now is a great time to spread the word — or at least to talk about building on it. Most people are ready to hear what you’ve got to say.
Hey, that’s right, I feel really good about this new assault on stupidity by Dawkins. How did they know that!
Time to spread the word!
Penn & Teller found someone that has a pretty good explanation. He also conducted experiments. Having once been a believer in it, he now goes around showing why its complete BS. His findings:
1. It works even if people merely *think* they have had needles stuck into them.
2. It works even if you use the wrong locations.
3. It works **as long as** the practitioner sounds like they believe in it and has a convincing and complicated explanation of how it works, where the version they use originated and how effective its been for other people.
I.e., its all placebo effect. It says more about how we have neglected the mental state of patients when treating them than anything else. But also represents a ethical issue. If lying to a patient about the effectiveness of a treatment improves its effectiveness, is it ethical to do so, or is just lying at all unacceptable?
To be honest, I’m not entirely convinced astrology ISN’T true. Although I’m fully aware that it can simply be a con job (having personally known more folks who do this, and do it well) I also think there may be some truth in it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not out consulting astrologers or anything, but I’m intrigued by the basic theory– and see if it doesn’t make sense to you when I lay it out a bit differently:
If the universe has regular, understandable laws, then knowing the future of the system should be as obvious as understanding the past. Daniel Dennett (sp?) does a pretty good job convincing me that the universe is mechanical in nature, and also points out that if something is in the universe, it has to be connected to something else SOMEHOW….
Take all this, and set it aside for a second.
Now imagine that you’re looking at this system, examining it to determine what’s happening. To me, it makes sense to look at the largest moving “parts,” especially if you’re really just beginning to understand how everything is going together. Astrology seems to be doing just that– examining massive movements to determine something smaller.
I don’t think astrology is saying that the planets or stars are CAUSING these events, as much as they are allowing folks to read them– the difference between believing an odometer causes your car to go fast, and understanding that you’re reading a simplified indicator of what is occurring in your engine.
Without getting bogged down in the details of astrology (much of which I’m sure is either wrong or simply made-up) can anyone tell me why what I wrote above doesn’t make sense?
I read the article at the weekend, same as most of the others, someone who objects to the message itself, so complains about that rather than addressing what Dawkins actually says – what little criticism there is, is incorrect.
There was another review in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2146483,00.html
Which I don’t recall Dawkins saying.
Plus one in the Sunday express, complaining that the main thrust of The God Delusion was an attack on Creationism and that Dawkins was trying to tar all believers with that brush
astrology is qualitatively different that creationism:
it makes falsifiable claims
we can propose experiments, and do statistical analysis. astrology make predictions, which we can then see if they come true. if they’re worthwhile and specific enough. of course, the problem with making testable predictions is that, if you’re bullshit like astrology, it becomes pretty quickly obvious.
DaveX, one thing I can tell you is that it’s a lot like acupuncture. As Kagehi noted well above, acupuncture is almost all placebo. Anything real results from acupuncture that aren’t placebo may exist, but they have no thing to do with acupuncturists’ explanations for why it works (meridians of energy throughout the body, and so on). There may be some explanation for the small percentage of it that’s not placebo (if there is any at all), but meridians aren’t it.
Same goes for astrology. There COULD be some relation between when you were born and what your personality type is. As we’ve seen through Dawkins and others, though, there’s no PROOF of that, and there’s certainly no real scientific evidence. There may be a relation between when you were born and what your personality is, though I doubt it, but the explanations about position of the stars in the sky when you were born hardly makes sense as an explanation.
Probably because in your example, there is a direct relationship between the two. There is no such relationship between events on earth and the stars – they continue on their way, no matter what happens here, we cannot change them, and there is no mechanism by which they can effect us. Nor is there any reason to suppose that some being set up the universe so that the stars would be a mirror of the events on this one particular planet.
That and the fact that study after study show that neither star signs, nor birth charts have any correlation to personality, experience, achievements or any aspect of life and that people can not pick out their chart any more than would be expected by random chance, or that astronomers cannot identify a person’s chart from personality tests. Plus, there is no indication of how these ancients collated the vast amounts of data (including very specific birth times) and were able to extract valid traits out of them.
Usually the inane crap that gets posted here is at least expressed in the form of sentences. Woot may be a decent chap and wrote that other screed against some flake, but who cares.
So, ok, if he stays, then can I ask you Woot, please stop posting that same post over and over? In fact, could you never post it again? That would be great.
(Sweet Jesus almighty I need to find something better to do with my time)
DaveX (#45):
Yes: things fall. If you place something (like, say, an astrologer) someplace in the solar system, he will fall in a way proscribed by the placement, mass, and motion of these large bodies. And it (he) will either go into an orbit, leave the system, or smack into something.
That’s a pretty simple and profound effect. But why would your personality and fate get affected by this? And if it did, why wouldn’t it be a big and pronounced effect? And if it were that big and pronounced, why wouldn’t there be less subtle variations: I.e. children born in the winter vs summer, or daytime vs nighttime?
This guy actually thinks it’s a -strength- of his argument that there are many more than 12 Sun signs, when in fact it’s a detriment. Your argument is that big simple things should have effects.. but big simple things should in general have big simple effects, and little distant things should have subtle or nonexistant effects. Not the other way around.
—Nathaniel
See, only a fake astrologer (did someone say, “oxymoron?”) claims 12 signs. The REAL astrologers (can you hear the sarcasm?) know about the 13th, Ophiuchus.
Of course, since there’s this whole other guy in the sky, that leads them to realize that the sky and stars have moved over the years and the constellations no longer apply to the correct months which means that the little categories no longer apply correctly to personalities…Ophiuchus is the short-cut to making astrologer’s heads explode via science. He’s the freakin’ symbol of modern medicine, snake and all, LOL, and yet very few astrologers even know he exists because it makes their little illusion go poof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiuchus
http://www.geocities.com/astrologyconstellations/ophiuchus.htm
Those of you who haven’t been reading blogs for a long time, or haven’t followed the progressive political blogs might be excused for not knowing this, but w00t is a blogospheric legend, and Pharyngula is blessed to have him.
I first ran into w00t on Eschaton’s comment threads back in 2000, before most folks had even heard of blogging. There was a lot of talk about banning him them, too. And at first, I was one of his critics. But here’s the deal: He’s a mostly harmless guy who injects a note of juvenile whimsy into contentious threads. The boobies are a comment on the dimwits and rascals like the astrologer PZ linked to in this post.
He rarely speaks in his own voice, but when he does (as in the comment thread Justin linked to), he shows himself to be one of the good guys.
At some point, I lost track of w00t and assumed he’d retired from posting boobies, so I was really delighted when he showed up here.
And, c’mon, boobies! The most lovably goofy of all seabirds! What more could you want? Titis?
The worst is this charlatan is paid by what once was a paper of reference. Nothing moves in the Media world without its astrologer. Lets face it, there is no proper news anymore anything printed is seen via the lens of entertainment.
Chiming in: the MB test is considered a useful tool precisely because it is taken by rating the subject based on their ACTUAL responses and experiences and then comparing their answers to a huge huge statistical pool of other people’s results on the same exact test. That’s at the very least a _plausible_ mechanism by which people can get a sense of themselves as compared to others when looking for, say, a career that fits their personality and interests. If by and large people that feel they are successful and fulfilled nurses all score in similar ranges (and they do), and this i because nursing in general involves similar sorts of tasks and social interactions, then if you have similar scores this is at least a helpful guide to the fact that nursing might fit you well as a career. Remember: after stripping away the Jungian rhetoric, the test is basically pretty simplistic: successful nurses need to be able to relate well and empathize with patients, and the questions basically rate whether or not that sort of thing appeals to you. Not exactly rocket science.
I’m not trying to sell the test as purely scientific: it is, of course, a subjective tool and used in psychology. But it does have all the plausible mechanisms of usefulness that things like astrology completely lack.
Hey, 1728 is 12 to the 3rd! (Stop looking at me like that. There’s a famous Ramanujan story about it, and a fairly well-known Feynman anecdote, too.) Without knowing anything else about this particular astro-buffoon, I’d guess that they sell you horoscopes with three Zodiac signs instead of one.
I’m liveblogging Dawkins sticking the boot in to wooists on UK TV
Just a note to say that Dawkins’ “The Enemies of Reason” is broadcasting on Channel 4 right this moment. Oh, it’s painful to watch, being exposed to this much foolishness.
It is simple. There are 10 types of people in the world.
Those that understand binary, and those who don’t.
I think the Ramanujan story was about 1729 (which was the number of GH Hardy’s cab when he was visiting Ramanujan in the hospital, Hardy said the number was unremarkable, Ramanujan said that it was in fact remarkable being the smallest integer which could be expressed two different ways as the sum of two cubes), unless we’re thinking of different stories (there are quite a few).
the MBTI test may not be pseudoscience, exactly, but that doesn’t mean it’s useful or meaningful. it might measure “real” aspects of personality yet not tell us anything we can use.
it splits people into binary categories based on where they fall on linear scales; very well, if that is to make sense, we should expect that the statistical distributions along these scales ought to be bimodal, so that relatively few people should fall near the dividing lines. but as far as i’m aware, this is not so — the actual distributions appear to be nearly bell curves, and the dividing line seems to go through the curves’ crests. (google MBTI criticisms for references, that’s all i did.)
moreover, individual variability over time is large enough that people can randomly flip pigeonhole in any category where they’re near the middle already, as most people apparently are. so the MBTI, for possibly most folks, is similar to flipping a coin four times.
i’ve taken the thing a number of times, and it seems i coin-flip along three of the four axae. the extroversion — introversion axis i always, reliably, max out introverted. but i knew i was an introverted nerd long before i heard of the MBTI, so what good does that do me?
The smallest positive integer that can be expressed in two different ways as the sum of two different cubes, that is.
oh, and concerning w00t: i second HP, comment #53. that is all.
Well, sure, it’s 12^3. The number makes perfect sense if you view a basic chart as requiring at least the Sun, Moon and Ascendent signs (the big three, you might say). Throw the other planets (Mer, Ven, Mars, Jup, Sat, Nep, Ura) into the equation and the number goes up fast:
61,917,364,224
Yup, almost 62 billion personality types accounted for based on planet/sign alignments, without even considering angles. That’s a pretty fine degree of granularity – but, as everyone correctly points out, it’s only meaningful if those types correlate to anything real. Sure, I have plenty of Gemini traits – but so do plenty of people who don’t have a Gemini sun.
The argument that serious astrology is complex and nuanced is true enough, but hey, so is Middle Earth. If you lay out a complete chart, just about any observable personality trait can be accounted for by something in the chart, which lends an aura of accuracy and legitimacy to the chart, which proves… nothing, really, other than that the array of traits made available by any chart are likely to cover traits that actually exist. Traits that appear in the chart that don’t seem to manifest in the individual to whom the chart applies are arbitrarilly dismissed as being below the threshold of observability.
ah the observer. The guardians embarrassing stable mate, as shown in the recent stupidity over MMR.
I am surprised they didnt stick it on comment is free blog though, since they have been constantly running pro-religion or pro-atheism threads just to watch the page count spiral.
Damn, people! Sometimes I swear it’s like I’m talking to monkeys or something. I don’t think for a second that planets or stars CAUSE anything about our personalities. Get that? I’m sick of writing something as plainly as I possibly can, only to have it re-interpreted for me. It’s frustrating, like pointing out circular arguments to a Jehovah’s Witness.
What I’m saying is that if the universe is a closed system (and how could it not be? if something isn’t affected by, or affecting something else, it CAN’T be IN the universe, right??) then I don’t see how it isn’t possible to look at ANYTHING and not use some sort of process to determine the past, the future, the present, etc. If I follow this thought to the extreme, I don’t see why with a number of calculations, one couldn’t read a snot pattern and tell you all about the life cycle of a cheetah. I am merely suggesting that it is quite possible that astrology is a simpler method of this– not an act of divination or magic– and that “reading” the stars or planets or whatever may be the easiest method, simply due to their enormity.
How can this be wrong?
I wonder how many people who simply write off acupuncture as crap know what they’re talking about. Double-blind studies about acupuncture are avaliable on PubMed and WebofScience and they’re worth reading. The degree of placebo effect in acupuncture is overstated, and there has been evidence to support the theory that acupuncture works as a mechanism to stimulate biochemical responses in the superficial fascia. (As well as other testable hypotheses regarding its utility and function.)
Uninformed opinions are damned annoying.
There are two problems that I see with the situation as you lay it out, DaveX:
1.) It isn’t true that everything in the universe acts on everything else. First of all, things cannot have an effect on things that are too far away to be influenced within the life of the universe, given the speed of light as an upper speed limit; and
2.) The effects that are supposed might be so small or otherwise dwarfed by other effects that their analysis is meaningless.
Using your claim, if the positions of the sun, moon, and planets have an effect on my personality, then the positions must also contributed to the fact that English is my native language. However, I think there are better explanations for my Anglophoneness.
Oops, forgot to add:
What’s with the “Ban Woot” movement, here? I can’t imagine a more harmless, even oddly charming, bit of running-joke silliness. I’d be more willing to support a six-month moratorium on the use and abuse of the “PYGMIES+DWARFS” reference. :-)
Helene Langevin at the University of Vermont researches the mechanism of acupuncture. Go ahead and inform your opinion.
DaveX:
Chaos. Quantum effects. The fact that mountains, much less our moon and sun, mass a hell of a lot more than a cheetah and have a far greater gravitational effect on snot than a feline ever will. The fact that physics isn’t everything, and that chemical and biological influences impact on things like snot.
DaveX
Re: Atrology as possible. Sure, why not! However, please enlighten me with some mechanisms that would somehow cause my personality to be corrolated with the mass of the universe? Is this gravitational? Electromagnetic? Neutrino-flux, perhaps?
To recap: *anything* is possible – but just saying so is merely a hypothesis. To move beyong mental wanking (which I indulge in frequently, I might add) you must define experiments that challenge the hypothesis to determine the (in)validity of the hypothesis.
This, demonstrably, has failed for atrology. I have never seen/heard of any experiment that supported *any* of astrology’s claims.
So – sorry for crapping of the party. But bring a hypothesis that is somehow *TESTABLE* and then come back with the results.
As someone mentioned earlier, the number of ‘potential traits’ according to the position of the local planets is of the order 62 billion, without even considering discrete angles. Quite a challenge you’ve set yourself.
Returning to the personality test pseudoscience, I suppose it would be harmless if it weren’t taken so seriously by those who least understand it. Organizations make hiring decisions based on the Myers-Briggs, for example. Other tests purport to predict honesty, diligence, and performance. During one off-site extravaganza I attended some years ago, everyone was given the MB, almost as a lark. But then when we split into small teams to evaluate the resumes of hypothetical “new team members”, people were seriously scrutinizing the MB attributes on the resumes of the fictitious new members, trying to see if they would fit into the team. It was obvious to me then and remains even more so today that only being on a team can predict how someone will function on a team. Social dynamics are extremely complex and no test will provide a reliable predictor. But mine was a lonely voice in the wilderness. New members were accepted or rejected on their MB ratings alone. It’s a pitiful case of faux modeling, assigning useless numbers to a phenomenon and then pretending they have meaning. I’ve come to refer to this as GIGO – garbage in, gospel out. I see it in statistical analysis all the time. This is not rare behavior even by the educated among us. The hunger for determinism is as powerful as the urge for sex, and perhaps even more so. Men and women religious will forgo sex, belongings, and personal liberty to gain at least the illusion of determinism.
DaveX:
It’s not *even* wrong. It’s simply woo. (see previous post on how to get into the *merely wrong* category)
Kseniya, I noticed that, while you don’t normally append OM to your name, you did for this comment. Was that intended to inject a little seniority to your statement?
‘Cause that doesn’t make you the boss of the world you know.
The claim of astrology having “1,728 personality types instead of 12” is undermined by Spencer’s own horoscopes published in the same edition of that newspaper.
“There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, … Actually, astrology’s basic personality types number 1,728.” – Neil Spencer, Aug 12th 2007, ‘The Observer’
“Your astrological week ahead” (for each of 12 zodiacal signs) – Neil Spencer, Aug 12th 2007, ‘The Observer’.
Dustin (#60):
Sure, the Hardy/Ramanujan anecdote revolved around 1729, but you can’t remember the punchline without knowing the significance of 1728.
Ah, Brownian, LOL, I wondered if someone would comment on that. You are correct, I do not usually append “OM” to my name here. Whether or not it appears randomly or arbitrarily is something about which you could probably develop a workable hypothesis…
Anyways, I have no great desire to be the boss. I was just throwing in my two cents.
Rob Hinkley, yes of course it’s all nonsense, but the horoscopes are just brain candy for those with a taste for it, and IMO quite a different aspect (!) of astrology than the birth chart aspect. FWLIW. :-)
On the subject of personality tests, Dr. Timothy Leary recounts a story in the book “Pranks!” (one of the late lamented ReSearch line). On one occasion when he was taken to prison, they gave him a personality test which was supposed to determine how much of a flight risk he was — whether he was a troublemaker or a keep-your-head-down, serve-your-time kinda guy. Well, as it happens, the test they gave him was one the good Doctor himself had designed! He promptly filled in all the appropriate circles to convince the authorities he was the last person on earth who’d think of mounting an escape attempt, and was over the fence by the end of the week.
On the topic of ωÒÓ†, I second comment #69, for numerological reasons of course as well as the fact that I agree with it.
NB Back a couple of thousand years ago, when astrology was being invented, there *was* an excuse for it being partly true. It has nothing to do with stars and planets of course and everything to do with seasons (for which stars are a convenient measure among primitive people) and locality. With food types and quantities originally being very time-dependent, it is entirely possible that deficiencies of certain things during foetal development made a noticeable difference to most people born at the same time of year. Eg folic acid is known to play a key part at a key age.
Of course, this fails to apply in the claimed way outside the location for which it may once have been true, eg the seasons are reversed and the vegetation is completely different in the opposite hemisphere. Plus it could only ever have been at all true for the crude zodiac signs – never the planets and never the 60 year oriental astrology cycle. It certainly won’t be true now in populations with supermarkets and food which is force-grown out of season, shipped in from around the world or laced with supplements. The difference now is between those born beneath the sign of the Big Mac etc vs the signs of high income and high education and so on.
I find the use of the MB test in hiring completely hilarious. Not only is it of no particular use in determining future job performance, but if you know what kind of traits your employer wants it is incredibly easy to lie your way through. Kind of like the tests they give you to determine how honest and trustworthy you are. The least honest people are the ones who do best on those.
wÒÓ† deserves a MEDAL for his persistence in that JAD thread. So what if he posts links to boobies. Seriously, who doesn’t like boobies?
I checked all my horoscopes for this day, 13/08/07, and not one mentioned my showing up for an appointment a day early. In fact several contradicted each other.
w00t: you have my utmost respect for putting up with JAD and his sockpuppet/sycophant vmartin. Post whatever inane crap you want, I won’t ever complain. ;) <3
DaveX (#66):
Assuming a deterministic universe and arbitrary precision, you are correct. Given enough detail, almost any measurement can give you precise information about anything.
Of course, that’s quite an assumption. “Enough detail”, for the sort of stuff we’re talking about, would entail, oh, thousands and thousands of decimal places of accuracy? That’s an extreme lower bound – I’m sure the actual number is in the realm of 10^1000 and such. (In general, I just mean, “A really, really big number”.)
Even with the most sophisticated instruments in the world being turned to this problem, we wouldn’t be able to determine anything. As noted somewhere before, the gravitic influence of Mars on us is roughly equal to the gravitic influence of a large truck a couple hundred yards away. Rather than worrying about whether a planet is aligned with a constellation, we’re likely to get better information by asking whether the neighbor’s car was parked in the driveway or in the street. At the least, this bit of info will represent a larger effect on us than a planet will.
As well, though this is all theoretically possible, one would have to actually show that this work was done at some point. That is, are there any records that show demographic studies being done over the lifetimes of small children in Ancient China or wherever? There isn’t any indication that any such thing took place, despite the fact that it would be quite a large undertaking to do so. All claims as to the history of astrology basically trace back to “and then some guy made some stuff up that other people believed.”
Finally, even if such a thing could be verified and there were studies in antiquity that were done, a modern statistical analysis should then also support such things. They do not. They show plainly that people cannot determine what sign someone was born under (substitute one’s favorite astrological determiner if this is too imprecise) better than chance. This is direct evidence that any astrological system tested as of yet is BS.
So, to sum up, every form of astrology known so far is BS that has been made up. While, theoretically, assuming several things about the universe that likely do not hold, one *could* use the positions of the planets to determine something about a person, it would require mind-boggling precision, almost certainly below the planck length, and thus is impossible in the real world.
This is why all the snark comes out with posts like yours. It’s not that your ideas are bad – as I said, they’re fine assuming certain things that are unfortunately almost certainly false – but they are exactly the sort of quasi-scientific crap that is so often pulled out to justify a wooster’s belief in their pet psychosis. See: ‘quantum’ for more details.
1. It works even if people merely *think* they have had needles stuck into them.
2. It works even if you use the wrong locations.
3. It works **as long as** the practitioner sounds like they believe in it and has a convincing and complicated explanation of how it works, where the version they use originated and how effective its been for other people.
You have to wonder what would happen to someone under the knife for whom acupuncture is working if their acupuncturist suddenly said “Damn – I have the wrong page. This only works on bunions…”
astrology is qualitatively different that creationism:
it makes falsifiable claims
we can propose experiments, and do statistical analysis. astrology make predictions, which we can then see if they come true. if they’re worthwhile and specific enough. of course, the problem with making testable predictions is that, if you’re bullshit like astrology, it becomes pretty quickly obvious.
Not at all. Try this, and you will immediately get “Oh, that’s not [sneer] REAL astrology. [Sneer] REAL astrology is much more complicated and works. Oh, no, I don’t have time to actually show it to you [sneer], it takes a lot of commitment. No, I don’t have time to make predictions with this REAL astrology.”
MBTI has 16, not 4, types.
And 16 is the square of 4, which is a popular number in mythology and ancient cosmology worldwide: Four seasons, four humours, Four Horsemen, etc.
16 is also the number of Court (face) cards in a Tarot deck: Four suits — Wands (fire), Swords (air), Pentacles (earth), Cups (water), each with a King, Queen, Knight, and Page.
Court cards are supposed to represent individuals that the Querent (the person for whom the reading is done) will or has encountered; each card represents a different mixture of elements: Grossly simplified, Wands are fire, and so are Kings, so the King of Wands is a very fiery, hotheaded person. Queens are watery, so the Queen of Wands is a person with both water and fire warring for supremacy in her makeup; well balanced, she’s both forceful and compassionate; badly balanced, she’s a passive-aggressive beeyotch.
Sounds a lot like Myers-Briggs, doesn’t it?
PW (who herself drives the MB testers nuts because she can be an INTJ, INTP, or ESTJ on any given day depending on her mood and whether she feels like messing with the tester’s head).
Dave…at least that bit of snot has a variable shape, viscosity, size, color, and chemical markers. The orbits of planets are essentially perfectly predictable.
Even the most liberal sorts of non-localized quantum mechanics don’t say “everything affects everything equally“. You’ve still got to inject some sense of proportion and probability.
This is largely incorrect.
There are a couple of angles that make what you’re describing not merely unfeasible, but literally impossible.
The first is good ol’ Heisenbergian uncertainty. By attempting to take the very, very precise measurements you’d need to make, you are also influencing the thing you’re trying to measure. In order to compensate for that, you’d need a way of very accurately measuring the effect that your measurements have and, well, you can see where this is heading.
The second is not merely big numbers, but unimaginably vast ones. Not 10^1000, more like 10^(10^(10^(10… and so on, exponents stacked through the roof. In attempting to measure the effects of billions upon billions of particles interacting in billions upon billions upon billions of possible reactions, you quickly find yourself in the realm of numbers that are not only practically incalculable, but literally incomputable.
DaveX,
See, for example, Phil Plait’s takedown of astrology at his Bad Astronomy blog. Assume for the moment that some mechanism exists such that birthdate is correlated with personality. Note that you don’t have to make any assumptions about the cause of the correlation, just that it exists.
Then the correlation should be measurable. People have tried to measure and quantify this correlation. It’s safe to say that they have failed, and by now it’s pretty well demonstrated that there is no correlation between birthdate and personality.
Coming up with explanations for how astrology might work seems like a wasted effort, given the demonstrated evidence that astrology in fact does not work.
Truth is eternal. There are four personality types.
Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine and Phlegmatic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Temperaments
Xanthir–
I think you’re more or less the only person here that gets what I’m driving at, and yes, I’d already checked Phil Plait’s workover of astrology a while back– and I pretty much agree with him: I don’t think Saturn’s gravity or forces or whatever could have as much measurable effect on us as say… my bike, and I know astrology does harm to many people, I’m quite familiar with folks’ tendency to gloss over bad predictions, etc…
I can’t emphasize how much I truly want to resolve this problem– I DO NOT want to come off like someone trolling this comment thread, and I DO try to figure this out as best as I can.
But still, I don’t think anyone is really quite understanding me. I have this idea that I must be typing something wrong, or misleading everyone somehow, because we’re talking at cross-purposes. So let me try ONE MORE time. If it doesn’t work out, I promise I’ll drop it.
Alright. *deep breath*
I’m just going to assume that the universe is basically like a machine, and that eventually, we could know all the properties and laws of this machine. From reading Dennett (admittedly, about 10 years back, so forgive me) I grew interested in the idea that everything in the universe is affecting/being affected by at least one other thing. I agreed with him that if something wasn’t able to be affected/affect anything else, it couldn’t really be in the universe.
This seems reasonable to me.
It also seems reasonable that if everything is somehow, eventually, tied to everything else; that understanding these linkages and laws would allow the universe to be completely understandable.
Is this possible with astrology? Let’s just assume not. If I assume it’s complete wrong, the numbers are off, and that it’s completely backwards in every way; it still doesn’t get me away from the idea that the universe should be able to be understood by looking at ANY of its parts.
I’m obviously not a scientist, so forgive me for being a bit fantastic– but if you DID understand enough laws/properties, etc… couldn’t you see that proverbial “butterfly effect” from start to finish? Couldn’t you lay it out on paper, and say “well, this planet moves in such and such way, and that means X, and that leads to Y, and that means Z?” Even if this was really complex, couldn’t it be done?
Why not? Seriously, I really want to know!
I just can’t picture any reason why this wouldn’t work. Surely you can all see how this is far different from me simply defending astrology, right?
Re: acupuncture. There are enough studies out there that show that the effects do not seem to be explainable solely by placebo effect. (Please do a quick search on Pubmed and read a couple of abstracts before mouthing off uninformed opinions.) Obviously, it doesn’t have anything to do with meridians and lines of chi and what-not. But it has enough efficacy that it is actually among the first line of treatments recommended by physicians for certain intractable pain syndromes, and insurance will actually cover it.
This is where you are going wrong, as several replies have tried to point out. You are assuming a deterministic universe, meaning that if we could measure the state of the universe at a given instant and knew all the laws that govern the universe, we could predict the state at any arbitrary future instant.
The problem is that quantum theory tells us that the universe is not deterministic but ruled by probability.
We can’t measure the state of the universe at a given instant. That’s not because it is too hard or too big a job but because it is impossible. It has already been pointed out in an earlier response to you that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle prevents this measurement. We cannot know both the position and velocity of a particle, we can measure one or the other but we can’t know both.
No, I can’t. You claim that people don’t understand what you are getting at but there have been several responses from people who clearly understand what you are saying and have pointed out why you are wrong. This is a very common tactic of defenders of woo. Your hypothesis is wrong, accept it.
Ok. First off, when talking about placebo effects there are *very different* levels of it. Someone that thinks they are being treated with 10,000 year old medical techniques are bound to have a greater result than someone who is given a pill, and knows that pills don’t work the same for *everyone*. Second, you can’t get past the fact that you don’t actually need to treat someone, just make them think they are being treated, nor do you need to use the right things. Its a mind trick. Its a very **good** mind trick, when compared to normal placebos, but still a trick. There is a guy on Sci-Fi Channel that has been doing stuff at least as profound, ranging from using psychological tricks to make one twin “feel” when he pinches the other one, to having people forget which station they are going to get off at from a train, by only talking to them for 1-2 minutes. Or the one case where he primed the entire mall full of people with what *sounded* like normal announcements, then in the last one, instead of simply telling them that there where great deals some place, he went, “Everyone who wants great deals, raise your hand!”, and everyone did it. And I mean *everyone*. Last, PubMed tries to make sure its stuff is accurate, but it has to rely on the veracity of the people submitting the articles, and right now the number of people trying to “explain” how it works, on the basis that it does work, far outnumber the ones looking at why it might work, despite the fact that it… doesn’t, in the sense they think of it working. When 90% of the stuff coming in is from people that are not taking seriously how easily the mind, of both patient and practitioner, can be tricked, what you get is lots of people going, “Damn! This works real well, or seems to, but I will be damned if I know how!”
As to the Astrology bit with DaveX. Its a simple matter of granularity, both in effect and measurement. Studying a bit of snot won’t tell you a damn thing “past” a certain point, since most of the data needed, like its actual velocity, how it formed *precisely*, etc. has been lost to other influences and effects. Imagine dropping an ice cube, not into a cup of tea, but a pot, which is still sitting on the burner, then coming back two hours later to see how hot it is. By then, the “drop” caused by the cube has been offset so long ago that there would be no measurable difference between the temperature “at that time”, than if one was never dropped in. Conceivably, one could measure the “exact” amount of water, to the molecule, conclude that there where 1-2 more than should be, but to do so would require knowing that the pot was heated at a constant temperature, and the *precise* chemical make up of the tea, through the entire process, so as to determine the effect that might have on how much was displaced. If you have that much info, you would already bloody know that someone dropped an ice cube in it. Without that level of data, you can’t say “what” caused the result, since all data needed to make such an assessment would be unavailable.
So, yeah, if you where omniscient, and thus knew every detail about how each tiny disturbance effected all others, and which ones simply canceled each other out, you could take something like the location of a planet on Jan 21, 1971 and predict what would happen to someone because of it on August 13, 2007. But if you knew enough to make such a prediction, you wouldn’t really need to make one.
DaveX: Quantum mechanics has taught us that we do not live in a “billiard ball” universe. Unpredictable, random chance must play a role in the subatomic realm. If it didn’t, then all kinds of freaky things would be allowed to happen, like sending messages back in time.
Einstein preferred a nice orderly universe, like the one you are describing, where if you had a calculator of sufficient power you could deduce everything. He didn’t like the ‘Uncertainty Principle’, believing that “God doesn’t play dice.” A century later he is still shown to be wrong.
What you are describing is as fundamentally impossible as attaining the speed of light by just going faster.
“Phrenology was well-studied by experts in its time…”
Anybody who believes in phrenology should have their head examined!
Peter Holt: I really don’t think DaveX is a wooster. For one, I recognize his name, and he hasn’t exhibited any tendencies that I recall. For two, his question is perfectly valid.
DaveX: Like I said, you would be correct given particular assumptions. Mainly, that the universe is deterministic and can be measured to arbitrary precision. As others have said, though, both of these are wrong. The first is dashed by quantum mechanics, the second by Heisenburg Uncertainty. Below a certain threshold, there is *no way* to determine something accurately enough to make the sort of calculations that you’re talking about.
K. Signal Eingang:
Thank you. The problem with exponential notation is that it simply won’t express numbers appropriately past a certain size. That’s why I resorted to just saying “a very very large number”. I was tempted to break out Conway’s Chained Arrow Notation, but I doubted most people would appreciate it. ^_^ Plus, I wouldn’t even be able to estimate to any reasonable degree of accuracy. I’d just be throwing out a big number, so instead I decided to just give an idea of what I’m driving at – that the numbers necessary are too large to be achievable.
I am late, but I will still give it a try – all about the MBTI this time!
Myers began working on the indicator some time before Jung, and coming across Jung’s work later, decided to base her indicator on Jung’s work in the area. Type of course is a very small part of Jung’s work, and neither Jung nor Jungians have had much to do with the MBTI. The MBTI should not be used to select people or be forced upon someone in any circumstance. A trained MBTI practitioner who works with a recruiter or any kind of skills evaluator to use the MBTI as a selection or evaluation tool is acting in breach of his professional obligations. The MBTI trust may not enjoy the clout of an AMA or any other professional association. But there are many MBTI trained practitioners who take their obligations seriously and will not stoop to what they believe is clearly professional misconduct.
The MBTI is not a psychometric instrument in the sense that it cannot measure anything. It makes none of the claims that are made for the veritable Noah’s Ark full of psychometric inventories that are in existence today. The individual is the best judge of his/her type, the indicator and the facilitator are good guides, that’s all. If you have taken the indicator any time after your 20s, it’s best you never take it again.
MBTI Type isn’t about traits and has nothing to say about traits. While traits are reductive, Type is expressive. An individual cannot be reduced to Type, Type isn’t all your life and not even about personality. There’s much much more to personality than Type, and more to life than personality.
Is Type pseudoscience? Good Type facilitators are strictly non-Woo, bad facilitators are all Woo. Looked at as simple behaviours, the MBTI dichotomies have a decidedly objective feel. But beyond that why question if the MBTI or Jungian theory is pseudoscientific? Isn’t Personality Theory as a whole of questionable scientific merit? How many personality theories put forward good proxy variables that you can measure and work with?
DaveX: I, too, believe that I know what you were getting at – that the entire universe could be extrapolated from a small piece of the universe – but agree that would require a closed and deterministic universe, which I think we do not happen to have. :-)
Nonetheless, I was very intrigued by a book I read when I was a teen called Macroscope in which astrology was presented as a calculus that was originally developed to explain and describe that which could be observed. It’s a flawed idea, of course, but it interested me when I read it, because it reversed the usual assumption that astrology determines rather than describes.
DaveX is definitely not a wooster, and most of us here know that, but Peter was drawing the parallel between Dave’s worries about being misunderstood and the woomonger’s claim that those who distain their particular field do so because they don’t (or won’t try to) understand it.
DaveX: One more point, since this whole field of science has always fascinated me, and I suspect your brain works a lot like mine:
You are correct in saying that everything is connected to everything else. “Entangled” subatomic particles can get freaky, kooky connected. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”
Modern theory suggests this weirdness: If a photon that has been traveling through the universe for 13 billion years has been “entangled” with another photon, and strikes a measuring device on earth today, it may display one of several possible states. That information is then fixed, instantly, in its entangled partner in its galaxy 26 billion light years away. Spooky!
Because of the ‘Butterfly Effect’, that bit of information may change the state of the far away galaxy, in millions of years, to be something completely different than if our photon had passed us by. BUT, there is no way to predict what that state will be due to the Uncertainty Principle. Predicting the future, with any certainty, is simply off limits.
BTW, I’m not a scientist either, (and I hope I got my facts right above), but there are some very good books available. If you’re at all intrigued by this stuff I would scan the internet and get a quick overview of quantum mechanics—double slit experiment, Uncertainty Principle, etc.—And then I highly recommend “The Fabric of the Cosmos” by Brian Greene, and Schrödinger’s Rabbits” by Colin Bruce. Also, Seth Loyd’s “Programming the Universe” has an interesting take on rendering the universe comprehensible by comparing it to a quantum computer
Lots of other good physics books too, of course.
If I pissed off any physicists then please correct me.
DaveX, let’s assume the universe is classically deterministic, down to to subatomic particles, a real billiard ball universe. Would looking at one piece of it tell you information about all other pieces of it? No.
If examine just the properties of that one piece of the universee at one moment in time it wouldn’t do the trick, because this would in of itself not tell you anything about the other pieces of the universe. Measuring the color, size, shape, and chemical composition of cheetah snot will not tell you about the planetary motion of Venus–at all. ANd yes, even if you measured every single subatomic particle’s position, velocity, trajectory, energy state, etc. (if this were possible)
No if by examining the cheetah snot you mean measuring the object + measuring all the forces acting on it, not only during a single moment, but over a long stretch of time, then…still no, you still couldn’t know everything about the universe. Why? Because there are infinite combinations of matter and energy possible which will provide the same readings on the cheetah snot. For example, if you could embed a gravity detector in the cheetah snot, you may detect vectors of gravitational forces that varied by vector (which angle it was coming from), but would that tell you there were two small planets on that vector or one large planet? Or 50 planets 1/50th the size? If some UV radiation were detected, is it from the sun or a tanning lamp 5′ away? Etc. The point is, there are infinite ways to produce the same existential state on a mass of cheetah snot.
I think to do the project you want in a classically determined universe, you need to full-on-measure every particle in the universe. (Or maybe all minus 1, since that last one will be fully determined?). For that reason, measuring the position and velocities of planets will not tell you about character traits. Why can you measure them and know something about their orbits? Because in those considerations, the gravity from other celestial objects is negligible enough to be ignored in the calculations, since the degree of precision is not that high.
Of course, as some have said, the universe is nowadays not considered to be classically deterministic. (Though I think that claim is worth debating).
Do you feel more understood now?
At last count, the number of human personality types is just about 6,327,586,226.
MH said
I thought wÒÓ† was a little eccentric, but then I read the thread mentioned by MH. wÒÓ†’s quiet perseverance exposed JAD as the completely fucking mental head-case that he is.
I, too, think wÒÓ† deserves a medal. (BTW, good job needling Davison on the donkey punch. Nice touch.)
I am very proud to have been here to witness the birth, and apparent death, of the fascinating Cheetah Snot Hypothesis. For this, I thank ‘DaveX’ and ‘cm’. :-)
Actually, I feel a LOT better now– I’m very happy to have gotten what I wanted to say across, finally!
I have done some reading on the Heisenberg Principle, and the “entangled” particles, the double slit experiment— and I readily admit that I simply don’t understand it. I guess I’m like Einstein in that small way: I don’t like it either, haha!
And no, I’m not a woo-freak. Thanks all who stuck up for me. Hell, I’ve been reading about this stuff since I was a kid, but my brain seems to have some limits to fully understanding it all– my hat’s off to those few who can really get their head around it. I find that whenever I’ve really, sincerely tried, I can get only a portion of the way into a basic write-up about relativity before it loses me (usually somewhere around the train/lightning part)– so you can imagine my difficulty with uncertainty. Same goes with the old cat-in-a-box concept. I’m the one yelling: “open the frakkin’ box already!”
Ack!
And hey, if the cheetah snot thing pans out, I want my cut!
Kagehi: Even if acupuncture works only as a sort of sophisticated placebo, the question is at what point do you stop calling something a trick and start calling it effective treatment through mental manipulation. Frankly, I prefer to use treatments that encourage my body to do the healing work itself than treatments that do it for me. If the human body is up to it, it usually does a much better job than brute medication. And, if the treatment does its job through suggestion, as a patient I don’t care – if it makes me healthier, it’s not quackery, period. Of course, as a scientist, I am very much interested in how it works – I am not trying to shut down the discussion here (I also think the meridians and chi stuff is BS), but I do think we need to re-frame it.
By the way, I also tend to think that the placebo effect is mistreated – instead of seeing it as a massive clue to how powerful the mind is, and how much effort medicine needs to put into discovering how to use this to our advantage, we tend to dismiss it as the benchmark for “tricks” and “quacks”, and further ignore it.
Its surprising the Japanese obsession with blood types as determinants of personality hasn’t caught on over here. People are always on the lookout for some new woo to exploit/be duped by, and the growing interest in Japanese pop culture products like anime has exposed a lot more people to the idea. Interestingly I read someplace the suggestion that this woo does work in determining the personality of many Japanese, because they know what personality type you’re supposed to have if you have a certain blood type and therefore behave in a fashion that matches the claims of the woo.
Frank Tipler has one of the more quirky mixes of physics background and Christian-ness in the universe. If I recall correctly, he surmises that a super-computer/Von Neumann machine at the end of time should be able resurrect everybody based on the information in light rays. (that was a decade ago…it seems like most cosmologists are now leaning away from a “big crunch”).
Given quantum reality, I wonder how he worked around some of the objections voiced above.
My small understanding of the debate around acupuncture is that physicians who have empirically observed a (limited, inconsistent) effect from the treatment suspect that it might be explicable in terms of the “pain gate” hypothesis of Melzack and Wall (1962, 1965) [apologies for Wikipedia, I’m busy].
That said, I have no idea:
* Whether Melzack and Wall’s work is still regarded as respectable;
* Whether anybody has ever designed, let alone carried out, an experiment to demonstrate its implication in the observed effects of acupuncture;
* Whether any physical effect that might or might not be so demonstrated would be sufficiently strong without the placebo effect to be worth anybody’s while.
Given that the sun, and probably the moon, being where they are produce physical effects that are fundamentally responsible for the existence of England, this isn’t the best analogy. ;/
On woot, my initial interpretations of observing him posting was to infer that this was a spammer similar to the imitation davescot whose porn links PZ was replacing with the “boobies” link for humorous purposes. Since that doesn’t seem to be the case I can say their comments don’t bother me. :/
“The boobies are a comment on the dimwits and rascals like the astrologer PZ linked to in this post.”
In that case, wouldn’t some reference to ‘pricks’ or ‘tossers’ be more appropriate? I fail to see the connection between idiocy and human mammary glands. Especially when most of the ‘dimwits and rascals’ don’t possess them.
Did anyone mention above that there aren’t twelve “signs” in the zodiac (The constellations through which the sun passes?) There are thirteen. The 13th is Ophiuchus, the snake handler.
And the dates for the constellations having the sun pass through them that astrologers use are about 2000 years out of date.
BTW, using the 13-constellation star coordinates and the methods of celestial navigation, sailors are able to make extremely accurate statements about the future, of the type, “if you don’t veer south soon, you will go aground on a coral reef, and today will be a really, really bad day.”
The astrologer in my local paper once claimed that if anyone could make better predictions with the 13-sign zodiac than he could with the 12, he would immediately quit the business. I wrote in an example like the one above, and the paper published it, so I know the astrologer must have seen it. But, alas, his prediction that he would quit turned out to be just as false as all his other predictions.
DaveX
Assuming, fot the sake of argument, that we DID live in a deterministic universe, since I think that all the comments explaining that your idea is wrong because we don’t are not really answering the quiestion you are actually asking –
Yes, in that case, it is conceivable that the movements of the planets could have an effect on you. However, so would everything else, so it would be impossible to determine WHAT effect they would have without taking all those other things into account.
We would probably accept that what your mother ate while she was pregnant had an effect on the way you turned out.
What astrology is effectively saying is that the way a person turns out can be reliably predicted from what his/her mother ate for lunch on the 27th day of her pregnancy, without knowing, or even asking, what she ate the rest of the time.
It’s also odd that in this age of Caesarians, preemies, induced labor, etc., astrologers are still concerned with the moment you pop out, not the moment of conception.
I just can’t picture any reason why this wouldn’t work.
Because (even if there was an effect on personality delivered at birth by almost infinitesimal gravitational forces) you would never be able to do the calculations… you need an infinite amount of time to collect the infinite amount of information you need to make an accurate, precise prediction.
On a more practical scale, what the mother ate for dinner just before conception is going to have far more impact on the spawnling than any star.
“were you born at or below sea level, or above sea level?” as a personality signifier? Well, perhaps it might show an above average tendency to wear orange. It would be typical of woomongers to seize on the slightest bit of coincidence as proof, but they’d still complain if you sold them a one-handed watch at midday.
Actually, if it’s during the flu season there might be a greater quantity of cheetah snot to become entangled with the biosphere…hmmm….let me do the calculations, I’ll get back to you.
Ruth, as a human of the female persuasion I wholeheartedly agree with your point of view. However, it’s abundantly clear that you haven’t clicked on the link. :-)
i wish I could find the quotation but many years ago I read someone (Montaigne?) who praised astrology as the daughter who whored herself to support her mother, astronomy. The idea being that if an astronomer wanted the protection and support of a local aristo, pure research wouldn’t cut it, but offering insights into the future…
By the same token, how many alchemists knew damn well they couldn’t turn lead into gold but as long as the belching illiterate in the throne room thought they could, at least they had a lab?
And no-one has quoted WS yet.
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,–often the surfeit
of our own behavior,–we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon’s tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing.
I miss “Psychic Psmith”, the Sunday Telegraph’s parody astrologer. Sadly no longer published. Here’s some samples:
Taurus:
“Are you a lover or a fighter?” asked Observer stars man Neil ‘Clever Chops’ Spencer under Taurus recently. Come on, Clever Chops: get off the fence and earn your money! Either that or walk away. What’s it to be?
Leo:
Tuesday looks promising financially, as Mars cashes his Giro[1] in Leo. Invest heavily in petrochemicals and/or Heartstruck Magic Boy who will be running out of trap four in the second race at Wimbledon[2] on Friday and is certainly coming into form.
[1 – Unemployment benefit]
[2 – Wimbledon greyhound racetrack]
Scorpio:
My apologies to all Scorpio’s for last weeks’ misprint, the result of a transcription error. The entry should have read “fantastic luck ahead” and not as it appeared. Thank you to all those who wrote in. Both the offended and the disappointed.
Libra:
Friends are insisting that you do things their way, but you should listen to the promptings of your own conscience. You will find these on 87.6 FM stereo, continuing after the news on 847 medium wave. Lucky salted snack: Chilli Tortillas.
Those are great, Electric Dragon. Better than the ones in The Onion, I think.
One of my relatives also thought the Sunday Telegraph parody of astrology was much better than the “real” (ie fraudulent) thing – and was disappointed when the parody was dumped but the frauds remained. The woo people had probably complained that they were being mocked with many pertinent mockings.
There is something very charming about the notion of Mr. Spencer frolicking with the little fairies at the bottom of his garden.
Maybe he’s going to take unicorn riding lessons this week . .
I belive that you do overstate the case against acupuncture. There have been some placebo-controlled studies (putting the needles in where experts say they will have no effect) for stuff like menstrual cramps that show some benefit. Here is the (admittedly equivocal) 1998 statement from the NIH:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=9809733&ordinalpos=7&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
I suspect that using a person’s time/date/place of birth to determine things about him/her may be useful, if one looks less at the stars and more at things like what food-related chemicals and seasonally-triggered hormones were coursing through the mother’s veins during the time the person was conceived and during the nine months afterward. (There is some evidential justification for focusing on the period around conception, rather than birth: We know already that drugs like alcohol are more harmful to fetuses in their early stages of development than at the later stages.) But then it wouldn’t be astrology, so much as natalogy (or whatever neologism one wishes to create).
Sure, and then you throw in other bits of data such as how many older brothers the newborn has…
Nonetheless, I was very intrigued by a book I read when I was a teen called Macroscope in which astrology was presented as a calculus that was originally developed to explain and describe that which could be observed.
That might be the case *if* there was a repeatable correlation shown – recall the tracking down of an infection in London to a particular water pump even when the doctor didn’t know how the disease was transmitted.
There has never been a repeatable correlation convincingly demonstrated. Any supposed association of astrology with reality is a combination of selective bias, magical thinking and the observer effect.
Most people’s mothers will be significantly less embarrassed when asked to discuss the circumstances of their births.
LOL Chris, so true!
And:
Yes, of course I agree (and even if I didn’t, you’d still be right!)
There was a Scientific American Frontiers in which a researcher was profiled who studies the placebo effect specifically with acupuncture (it’s available online). Apparently the placebo effect can be even stronger than expected with Americans and acupuncture because it’s such an “exotic” treatment, people have even higher expectations that it will work. Pretty neat – he figured out how to make retractable acupuncture needles so people would get a sham treatment but still “see” needles being poked into them.
Chris y:re: “Pain Gate” Theory- it is at the very least reputable enough to be taught in undergraduate psychobiology courses for Neural Science students.My lecturer mentioned it near the beginning of the lecture on pain.
MB has always struck me as too vague to be useful. It is also very easily “gamed”.
ngong: Tipler’s ludicrous scheme (long story short) actually requires quantum mechanics for various dubious purposes.
Let us not forget the theory suggested in one of the late great Bob Shaw’s “serious scientific talks” that astrologers have the effect backwards and actually the minutiae of your life have a direct effect on the planets. Yes you may have had a crap day, but if you hadn’t Mars would have been knocked out of orbit.
Actually, acupuncture has had quite a few controlled, scientific studies done that show effectiveness in specific situations. If not knowing how something works invalidates it, the pharma industry is some really big trouble.
A quick search of pubmed turns up lots of studies and reviews showing varying levels of effectiveness. Also studies investigating the modes of action.
I’ve never had accupuncture and have argued against it, but after doing some research of actual studies to back up my gut reaction, I had to open my mind a bit and accept that I may not have been completely right.