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Debunking Astrology besides newspapers Sun Signs

AcesHigh

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Whenever I use the videos by Sagan, Randi, etc, to debunk astrology, I get replies that "Sun Signs" are nonsense, real astrology is not about that, but about the so called "Natal Charts".

Unfortunatelly, most debunking I was able to find on the internet is always about Sun Signs.

Obviously, Natal Charts made no sense anyway, since they are based on stuff invented by ancient babylonians, who thought Earth was flat and the stars and planets were fixed on a celestial abode.

But it would be interesting if someone could provide me with directions to better, more general debunking of astrology besides the usual Sun Sign debunking (which is after all just general mass media astrology, while astrologers claim Natal Charts are made for individuals and specific and personal)

here is the link for a video where I am arguing with a astrologer named Gae Xavier, and she got all irritated by the debunking of Sagan and Randi against newspaper Sun Sign and started with the old "Sun Sign is not real astrology, I make star maps and Natal Charts for decades and they are always right" :rolleyes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y84HX2pMo5U
 
The simple mathematics of the concept are pretty much broken on a base level.

If the position a celestial object millions of miles away effects you, a plane passing overhead would in theory effect you many degrees more.
 
I'd love to hear Gae Xavier's explanation for why sun sign astrology is BS, but natal charts that include other planets are not. My guess is you can simply take the debunking of sun sign astrology and replace Sun with Jupiter, or Mercury, etc... with the same efficacy.
 
Start with Shawn Carlson's 1985 double blind test of astrology. If they insist his test is flawed, offer to help run a similar double blind test that fixes the flaws.
 
JoeBentley said:
The simple mathematics of the concept are pretty much broken on a base level.

If the position a celestial object millions of miles away effects you, a plane passing overhead would in theory effect you many degrees more.
Click to expand...

obviously, because it´s magical :D

but truthfully speaking, isn´t Jupiter gravity stronger against you than the gravity of an airplane?

100 tons of mass at 1 km distance vs 1.89813 × 10^27 kilograms at 800 million km distance?
 
AdamSK said:
Start with Shawn Carlson's 1985 double blind test of astrology. If they insist his test is flawed, offer to help run a similar double blind test that fixes the flaws.
Click to expand...

I googled for it and surprisingly, the first result was not the test, but an astrologer website with an "article PEER REVIEWED by (what I think are) other astrologers" that claims a u-turn on that double blind test.

I am not that desperate to prove that women wrong in order to read all this nonsense... and if I cite Shawn Carlson's test, I bet she will find this astrologer's paper and claim it disproves it. Thanks anyway. Later I will check the original paper. Even if I do not use it, I guess I will find some stuff that I do not know about astrology which will help me debunk it in the future.

warning: possible nonsense load in the link below
http://www.astrologer.com/tests/carlson.htm
 
AcesHigh said:
I googled for it and surprisingly, the first result was not the test, but an astrologer website with an "article PEER REVIEWED by (what I think are) other astrologers" that claims a u-turn on that double blind test.
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm aware of that. It doesn't, but you're right that she may say it does.

Nonetheless, the methodology in that test is excellent. Carlson had a bunch of professional astrologers agree ahead of time that they could match day, time, and location of birth with the person's personality profile. And that's what they were provided with - the birth data and a handful of personality profiles to choose from. Not one of the astrologers matched significantly more than predicted by chance.
 
It's probably a bit dated (1988) but Astrology: True or False by Roger B. Culver and Philip A. Ianna (published by Prometheus, available from Amazon) is a pretty thorough guide.
 
JoeBentley said:
The simple mathematics of the concept are pretty much broken on a base level.

If the position a celestial object millions of miles away effects you, a plane passing overhead would in theory effect you many degrees more.
Click to expand...

But is that the theory? There's at least 3 branches of astrology, the sun and natal already mentioned, and then the vedic astrology from India.

I know I go very much in to the latter and talking to him it seems to me that all the positions of the planets/stars are doing is another way of measuring date, time, and place.

I have no problem at all with the idea that our personalities as we develop are affected by when and where we were born. Obviously there'll be significant cultural influences by location, but there's also been quite a few studies correlating month of birth with various behaviour traits. This week I read a study that showed children born in August are significantly more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.

Why? They hypothesize that it's a simple matter of them being significantly younger than their peers in the same school class. Less mature, more fidgety, more likely to annoy teachers etc.

I imagine the result would be different in Australia, which has different dates for starting school years.

Similar things have been hypothesized with influences of differences in seasonal foods nutrition at different times of year, sunlight and production of vitamin D, even how much time people spend indoors vs outdoors

Voila! Where and when you are born can influence your personality! Astrology proven!

Well, not really obviously. It's mostly Forer effect, and nothing to do with the planets per se, but I could certainly imagine that over the centuries people may have noticed broad generalizations about behaviour and personality linked to time and place of birth - the positions of the planets is in essence just a clock, so it may be just mostly Forer effect, not entirely.
 
Last edited:
icerat said:
... Voila! Where and when you are born can influence your personality! Astrology proven!
Click to expand...
It also works if your parents are astronomers; the positions of celestial bodies may have a significant effect on their availability, mood, and attention during your formative years ;)
 
What do you mean, “test” astrology? - Skeptico lists numerous tests of astrological predictions. The large majority of them failed.

Sun Signs are easy to test. All one has to do is check which Sun-Sign range that a birthdate falls into.

Birth charts are much more difficult. One has to check on which sign each planet falls into, and one has to check on the aspects: angles between the planets. If they fall close to certain special angles, something interesting can happen. These angles are astrological aspects:
  • Conjunction: 0d
  • Opposition: 180d
  • Trine: 120d
  • Square: 90d
  • Sextile: 60d
  • Semisextile: 30d
"Planets" here are what are usually called planets, along with the Sun and the Moon. Indian astrology is derivative of Western astrology, and it includes additional "planets": the Moon's ascending and descending nodes on the ecliptic.

The fancier astrologers also divide each Sun Sign into three "decans", named for having about 10 days each.

So there's a lot that one can test.


As to doing calculations, one can easily find open-source astronomical software, including software for reading calculated results like the JPL planetary ephemerides.
 
Steve Farmer article download page contains Neurobiology, layered texts, and correlative cosmologies: A cross-cultural framework for premodern history (PDF). Steve Farmer and his colleagues propose that "correlative cosmologies" were a common premodern conceptual framework.

Also fitting in is the medical Doctrine of signaturesWP, where medicinal plants resemble what they can be used for.

Also the Chinese Wu XingWP, a bit lists of sets of five entities all correlated with each other.

Medieval Western astrologers and alchemists did a lot, like relate planets and metals:

Sun - Gold, Moon - Silver, Venus - Copper, Mars - Iron, Jupiter - Tin, Saturn - Lead, Mercury - Quicksilver

That is why quicksilver is more usually called "mercury".

They also related planets and metals to such things as openings in our heads: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and one mouth.

This led to what might be called astrology's greatest "scientific triumph". When Galileo discovered Jupiter's four big moons, a certain Francesco Sizzi argued that they could not exist. This was because the traditional seven planets correlate with the seven openings of the human head, and thus there is nothing for those alleged moons to correlate to. Therefore, they cannot exist.
 
More seriously, about astrology, if it has great predictive value, then it could have been used to predict the planets that were discovered in modern times. Something like how Urbain Leverrier and John Couch Adams predicted Neptune from departures from predictions for Uranus's motions.

Urbain Leverrier also proposed that there was an intra-Mercurian planet from Mercury's extra orbit precession. However, that precession constrains possible intra-Mercurian planets much more poorly, compared to how well that trans-Uranian planet was constrained.

But no intra-Mercurian planets have been found, and recent observations have not found anything orbiting inside Mercury's orbit much larger than about 20 km.

In the late 19th cy., some astronomers had proposed modifying the law of gravity to account for that extra precession. Einstein's solution to that conundrum is essentially such a modification.

Can astrologers point to anything like that?
 
thanks for the answers. Will read them better tomorrow and lose some of my time with that crazy woman on youtube.
 
AcesHigh said:
...Obviously, Natal Charts made no sense anyway, since they are based on stuff invented by ancient babylonians, who thought Earth was flat and the stars and planets were fixed on a celestial abode.
...
Click to expand...

Not obvious to me.
 
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