This is my only post until probably next weekend except Starthinkers reading. First I've got History Books to read and then I've got University to attend and read more History Books.
Such as the knowledge that Astrology doesn't freaking work.
Whose Astrology are we talking about? Given the wide disagreements about theory and methods, it is Astrologically neccesery that a considerably large proportion of what they write and even entire Astrological forms (like either Vedic or Western Astrology) be wrong.
This is also why Rudolf Smit became a professional astrologer. After assuming for years that it was all nonsense he finally read about his sun sign and was astonished to discover how accurate it was. Have you read his life story?:
http://www.rudolfhsmit.nl/a-pass2.htm
You really should.
I read it all. Basically Rudolf Smit should have learned to rely upon himself rather than upon other people.
But given that 'other people' are the principle concern of the Leo, it is quite confirmative that realisation of the weaknesses of other people, both that of Astrologers and of the 'victims' should have been crucial to making him sceptical of Astrology.
Just as it was 'other people' that got him into it, it is 'other people' that got him out of it.
What are you referring to with the word "theory"?
The claim that a particular factor or combination of factors has a particular effect.
Not familiar with Gunter Sachs, or his study. Certainly, everyone has a bias, but the great thing about science is that biases don't matter; the results speak for themselves. If a theory predicts certain results, those results can be independently verified. So no subjective analysis is necessary.
Gunter Sachs is an idle millionare that decided one day to do something remotely constructive before he died and funded a study to test Astrology itself.
When I say Astrology itself, I mean that he didn't test any Astrological hypothesis, nor did test any Astrologers at all. Indeed Astrologers were barred from all participation in the study.
What he tested was the core theory of Natal Astrology, which is that the position of the planets when one is born has some form of effect upon your life.
The first thing he did was determine what percentage of the population are of each Star Sign. It turned out that Gemini is the most common Star Sign and Saggitarius the rarest.
What he did then was look at various you could say activities in order to determine if the Sun Sign was a Neutral factor (that is to say there were no statistically significant different depending upon what Star Sign there was.
He basically found that there was just such an effect. For instance if you are a Tauros (like me) you have a.
13.72% higher change of having a car accident.
This is based upon first having determined the total % of the population which are Tauros and then seeing what % of the people having car accidents were Tauros. If there isn't sufficiant difference in the %, the result is dismissed as being insignificant and not constituting proof of Astrology.
For instance, only Tauros and Virgo were determined to have an increased risk and only Leo and Scorpio were determined to have a reduced risk. All others were dismissed as being not beyond the realm of chance fluctuations.
Sorry, no. I promise you that if you guess correctly, I'll tell you. Since I think that personality is determined mainly by environmental influences, combined with genetic predispositions, of course I don't think that sun signs have anything to do with my personality, and if that is true then you have an exactly 1 in 12 chance of guessing, same as everyone.
If your not a Libra Sun, you might just have Mercury there. I say you are a Virgo Sun.
I see. Let me ask you a question... at the time that you started, did it ever occur to you that the reason your Sun Sign seemed fit you so well was because of the Forer effect?
I don't think it did.
Most people tends to exaggerate, in one way or another. It's human nature. Do you really think that "Jupiter exaggerates things"? Then let me ask you, what does that mean to you, in other words how do you think that Jupiter relates to exaggeration? Is this something you just take on faith because in your mind, "it seems to work for me"?
Everyone exaggerates something, since everyone *has* a Jupiter somewhere.
What I mean is that the characteristics assosiated with the Sun ITSELF, not with any particular Sun Sign are exaggerated in my case. The Self represents Self and Self-Identity.
This is why in practice I tend to immediately consider everyone beneath me even if they are actually better qualified than I am and more powerful than I am in reality.
I will respectfully disagree. I think the reason most people decide that it is bunk is because it seems to predict the same kinds of things you can find on fortune cookies. In other words, many people grasp the fact that vague predictions can be true for many people, and therefore aren't meaningful. This is also true for other things like psychics, but I think that in the case of horoscopes it's just slightly more obvious, and only slightly less obvious than fortune cookies.
Most people's practical understanding of Astrology is limited to Sun Signs. Sun Signs ought not to work if the Sun is weak in the chart overall.
Well that's a good point. I guess it's hard to think of very specific claims about personality that are also timeless.
Well then, if astrological predictions about personality have to be very general, I suppose that in order for them to seem real, they'd have to have a noticeably high accuracy rate. The problem with the readings you have given so far is that despite the fact that all of your predictions have been very general, there's still been a noticeable amount of misses. That seems odd to me, if astrology is truly real.
That's because sometimes I make mistakes and use theories that I got from others (and thus questionable) or are essentially experimental. But I fail to see what is vague about my predictions by Astrological standards. Compared to most they are ultra-precise.
But nothing I was particularly certain about when I wrote it has thus far been torn down.
The first time I failed to make claims that I should have made because I had already *disproved* them with 'negative Cold Reading'. I actually missed a key factor that is in there. I am unhappy with that reading generally.
But I am happy with the second reading, because in that reading I didn't Cold Read because I kept reminding myself that it was someone else and in particular the 'skelaton' of the predictions held, even if I lost a few predictions on the surface.
Well, I guess I have to disagree with you here. I think the subject is generally going to know themselves better than an outside observer. While it's true that sometimes people don't see themselves the way the world sees them, the outsider also has their own biases, and are always working with incomplete information.
So in general I think you should just go along with what a person says about their personality, over what your perception is. Unless you know that person *really* well.
I disagree. The basic problem is that everyone naturally assumes everyone else in the world is pretty much the same as themselves in their core motivates. People tend to think they are normal even when they are not.
Observation of someone else is generally better than letting them answer for themselves experimentally.
Since they will fail to recognise things they don't see as noteworthy because they naturally presume that everyone else is the same as they are.
The aim of the Astrologer is to notice how people are different from other people. If you simply rely on what they tell you, you will get just how they are not different from other people.