Whether of the Western or the “Vedic” variety (jyotiṣa), astrology obviously doesn’t work in the way that either the most sincere or the most manipulative astrologers believe it does. It has exactly zero predictive power. No astrologer agrees with any other, and the various lineages are fiercely competitive and resistant to peer review, not to mention scientific method. But when skeptics do look closely, they find that astrology and astrologers fail every controlled experiment that tests predictive power and the attribution of personality traits that the stars are meant to bestow. No astrologer can explain the stark differences in the lives of twins (or whether the conjoined Hogan sisters are one person or two) or why eighty thousand citizens of Hiroshima, each with wildly differing natal charts, should perish all in the same flash. There is no mechanism either gravitational or magnetic – besides awe and wonder – that can causally link the movements of celestial bodies to human affairs. Wikipedia collates a good selection of controlled studies here. Beyond this, the psychology of what happens in a cold reading has been exhaustively exposed. For a reading to even occur, the subject must be prepared by enthusiasm born of anecdote or cultural osmosis, their unawareness of predictive astrology’s status as a pseudoscience, or a willingness to suspend their critical faculties. With any combination of these three conditions firmly in place, the astrologer can begin with high-probability gambits – “You’re extroverted”, or “There’s something you’re afraid of” – and then read (consciously or subconsciously) the immediate verbal and body-language responses from his subjects to confirm the pathway forward. He transforms each inevitable factual mistake – “So you don’t have any children” or “So you’re not well-traveled” – into a fallback psychological deepity: “Well your work is your baby”, or “You travel in the mind”, narrowing in on any potential, however slight, for an emotional congruence that will establish an ersatz trust, while categories of knowledge become dangerously confused.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:23:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015