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WillowOne's Positions

Astrology and Tarot

My Positions

  1. Astrology has no predictive power beyond chance. Tarot has none either, and its practitioners increasingly say so themselves.
  2. Both work on the user through the Forer effect, cold reading, and the pleasure of being talked about.
  3. They are harmless as entertainment and harmful as decision aids. I would not legislate against either.

Notes

  1. There is no mechanism. The gravitational pull of the obstetrician exceeds that of Mars at the moment of birth. Precession of the equinoxes has shifted the zodiac by about a month since the system was written down, so most people are not the sign they think they are, and the Sun also passes through a thirteenth constellation that the system ignores. Astrologers disagree with one another about house systems, orbs and which planets count, and have no way of settling the disagreement, because there is nothing to settle it against.
  2. It has been tested, properly, and it fails. In Shawn Carlson's double-blind study (Nature, 1985), 28 astrologers chosen by their own professional body matched natal charts to personality profiles at chance. A study of over two thousand "time twins" born in London within minutes of each other found no similarity in personality, intelligence, occupation or anything else. Bertram Forer showed in 1948 that students rated a single generic horoscope, given to all of them, as an accurate description of themselves. Astrology is the Forer effect with a calendar.
  3. Tarot was a card game. The deck was invented in fifteenth-century Italy for a trick-taking game still played in France. Its occult meanings were attached in 1781 by a writer who announced, without evidence, that it was the lost book of Thoth, and the deck most people now use was designed in 1909. When pressed, modern readers say the cards are "a tool for reflection" rather than prediction, and then go back to telling clients whether to leave their husbands. That is the Motte-and-bailey fallacy, with prediction as the bailey.
  4. Why it persists. Horoscopes are written to be unfalsifiable (Popper's Razor): a prediction that "a challenge at work may test your patience" cannot fail. Readings are flattering, they are about the most interesting subject in the world to the listener, and the hits are remembered while the misses are not (Confirmation Bias). Astrology also supplies identity ("as a Scorpio I…"), which is the same service that religion provides, in a smaller packet, and the 2020s app revival sells exactly that.
  5. The harm is in the decisions. A President of the United States had his schedule set by an astrologer for most of his second term, which his chief of staff revealed in 1988. Marriages are refused, surgeries delayed and investments made on charts. As a parlour game it is harmless; as an input to any choice that matters it is a random number generator that charges a fee.

Sources

  • Carlson, S., "A double-blind test of astrology", Nature 318 (1985)
  • Dean, G. and Kelly, I. W., "Is Astrology Relevant to Consciousness and Psi?", Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (2003), on the time-twins study
  • Forer, B. R., "The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 44 (1949)
  • Regan, D. T., For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (1988)
  • Decker, R., Depaulis, T. and Dummett, M., A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (1996)

Also see