In defense of astrology

Astrology is the study of personality and personal events with respect to celestial objects and ones birthdate and location. It is often used in prediction of events of a person's life and their personality. In the European tradition, astrology is mostly based on the position of the sun in the sky, which constellation of the zodiac it is in, on a person's birthdate.

Most people are aware of astrology through the idea of a daily horoscope (often printed in newspapers on the comics page next to the word jumble or chess column) (these days with the increasing marginalization of newspapers, I don't know where people experience it).

Many people view it, and dismiss it, as entertainment, on par with palm reading or Tarot cards, not something to be taken literally. Those with a scientific or practical bent might dismiss it outright as an empty myth or BS because it is, to use the jargon, not falsifiable. There are a some who still believe that it may work.

But the general consensus is that it is BS. All I want to do is pedantically (but not to contradict this consensus which I share) show that Astrology is indeed scientific in the technical sense, just one that is not supported by the data. A science that has been falsified is still scientific, just disproven.

There are two common applications of astrology. One, based on your birth sign one out of twelve, to predict, is very vaguely the events of the day. For example (taken from a random horoscope site; it is very exemplary of the kinds of writing):

Today you urgently need to understand and master the art of balancing the physical reality with your vision. While your plans are ambitious, you have to understand the actual obstacles top these plans. Otherwise, you are headed for a collision course in spite of all your good intentions. You also need to understand that your plans may be conflicting with those of someone else who is as determined and ambitious as you.

(source (no link to the specific text for a day, just generic for the sign))

These tend to be the greatest source of disbelief: how can everybody having the same birth sign have all those things happen? These read like fortune cookies that could be true of anyone whatever their birth sign. Accidentally read the fortune of another sign and that is just as likely to happen or not. Astrological predictions like the above are a great example of confirmation bias in action; all you need to happen is for one thing to match what happened that day (if you read the horoscope after the day), or you just may make one of things happen, and you'll come to 'believe' that horoscopes work.

The other common application is a prediction of your distinct personality. A natal chart, the position of major celestial bodies with respect to the constellations and each other at the the time and place of birth, is used to predict personality. The position of the sun is the most important, telling you your 'sign', but the moon and planets and their relations are important. This facts lead to statements of the form like 'The moon is on the cusp of Libra and Virgo, and Mars is in opposition to Venus but square with Saturn meaning that...' followed by some explanation involving the personalities of those celestial bodies, inspired by their mythological stories.

(image from wikipedia)

My defense is that all these things make astrology not simply a myth but an actual scientific theory, scientific in the sense that it could be the case, and that we can test whether predictions by it or its parts hold or not and there is a postulated mechanism for these effects that holds up. Of course, none of it holds at all. My defense is simply that astrology is legitimately falsifiable.

Counter to most opinions, I consider astrology to be falsifiable because one can make a study of daily horoscopes or a study of star charts and individual's life events or personalities. There is very scientific measurement of celestial body positions. There can be predictive personality tests (but many currently personality tests are currently not considered particularly good at prediction, for example Meyers-Briggs personality test (MBTI), the somewhat similar Big Five test is supposedly somewhat more predictive).

St. Augustine's dismissal of astrology because twins don't have identical outcomes is motivating to me but scientifically could be problematic. Twins do share quite bit of personality. This thought experiment this could be modified only the slightest to be more supportable; compare the lives of two children born the same day in the same hospital. The general predictions of 'astrological theory' can barely be supported. Some lifestyle and class similarities will predict most of the similarity between the two children.

The horoscopes in newspapers or your astrological sign ("You must be a Libra!") are, I agree, not scientific because they are so vague as to be barely even functional much less predictive (meaning that the pronouncements they make can barely be mapped coherently to life events or personality.

But an astrology based on actual measurement could be falsified and therefore is a scientific theory. Its effects just have never been established.

By the way, the Middle-eastern-based astronomical astrology (the greco-roman constellations-sun-moon-planets and mythically associated personalities) may have exact predictive power but there's one huge glaring plain old mistake in execution. The constellation the sun is in, one's sun-sign, as usually given today, is mismatched with the prescribed dates.  The twelve ranges of dates are set on the sun based along the ecliptic and the positions of the constellations. The constellation labels were set 2000 years ago. Because of the (astronomically measured) precession of the equinoxes, the position of the sun during the year has shifted a little more than the space of one constellation.

(source: wikipedia)
That is, on March 21st (the spring equinox, that start of the zodiacal year), when tradition states that the sign of Aries begins, in the year 2000 the sun is actually as measured in the sky against the backdrop of the constellations, already part way through the next constellation of Taurus.

So this is not an error of interpretation or logic, it is an even more elementary error of data recording/reporting.

A scientific taxonomy of ESP

This could just as well be framed as a taxonomy of magic or magical creatures or comic superpowers; you may disagree with details but the whole structure holds conceptually. There may be no actual facts involved (or maybe there are!), but the concepts are consistent. Also, I take this as a subset of the taxonomy of magic because there's (currently!) no scientific evidence but in the back of our heads we kind of feel like maybe we've experienced it or really really hope that there is some small ability there

First, let's define ESP (extrasensory perception) starting from examples, often being lucky enough that there are single English words that already capture the essence, and abstracting. There's clairvoyance (seeing the future), there's telepathy (perceiving someone's thoughts), mind-control (changing someone's thoughts by your own), speaking with the dead, telekinesis (moving objects with your mind), predicting random cards.

I'm setting an arbitrary boundary so that things we informally think are magical are not included (ghosts, gremlins, witches), that are 'obviously' unscientific and magic tricks (card tricks, optical illusions), which are intentionally supposed to seem magical but have a deterministic scientific explanation (astrology (depends supposedly directly on the location of the sun and planets)). These choices of mine are somewhat arbitrary. They could easily be included but then where do we stop (wait what about tarot and palm reading and tea leaves? what about entertainment magic, sleight of hand and actual tricks (ha ha that's hard to say right))

With these examples in mind, we can start to take apart what it means to be ESP and categorize all the kinds. The first thing to notice is that, along with perception, I am including action. So extrasensory perception or action is perceiving or doing things beyond our known senses. So we are well aware of seeing with our eyes and pushing with our hands; ESP is the ability to do those without currently known physiological organs. Presumably the organ will end up being the brain (the seat of thought), but maybe if we find out that we are able to see through the backs of cards using higher frequency receptors in our eyes (a deterministic scientific explanation) then this action will become a nonExtra Sensory Perception (NESP).

This brings up the tangent of making well formed categories. It is usually considered bad practice to have a subcategory, a sibling category, that is 'everything else that is not included'. For example, the category Vehicles could include Cars, Bikes, Planes, and NOS (Not Otherwise Specified). The latter category might cause difficulty because a sailboat will have to change category if a new subcategory of Vehicles, namely Boats, is created. (Note the difference between a category (eg Boats) and instances (sailboat), which of course could be generalized to become a category on its own)

A taxonomy of concepts forms a tree which expects all subtrees to be non-overlapping. Most collections of concepts end up having some overlaps, and this will be pointed out, but non-overlapping is a simplifying assumption that will make things easier to diagram.

- sensing
   - 'perceiving' events
      - clairvoyance, premonition - seeing events in the future, past, or remotely
         - guessing cards
         - predicting events
      - telepathy - knowing others' thoughts
         - mentalism - cold reading
         - channeling - communicating with spirits
            - seances - speaking with the dead (formerly actual people), knowing the thoughts of someone who has died
   - sensing auras - 'seeing' the personality of a person
   - out-of-body experience - astral projection

- acting
  - telekinesis - or psychokinesis, moving objects
     - levitation - raising objects
        - oneself - as in extreme yoga
        - somebody else
        - objects
     - making objects disappear
     - modifying objects
        - bending spoons
        - destroying and remaking things (watches, dollar bills)
     - pyrokinesis - starting fires (inspired/invented by fiction, Stephen King)
  - telepathy - transfer of thoughts, more than just sensing
    - sending thoughts, communicating
    - putting ideas in someone's head
    - mind control
    - body control

I've never defined magic or science, only working with them informally. The creation of the relations among these things helps us define our terms, putting things together that go together but avoiding conflicts and inconsistencies by separating differences.

This is an exercise in philosophy and taxonomy. That is, I'm just playing with words and our mental perception of them, mainly because science could be done on these things, and has, but it has just never panned out. So all I have to go on them is what we imagine. So this taxonomy is not (as currently known) about scientific things, but is itself scientific because people have ideas of what these individual concepts could mean and could disagree with the relations I have put among them. Note that I've really only put a subset relation (is-a) and extremely minimal comments.

The only practical argument against any of these abilities being real (or scientific) is that no one has used any of these things for anything other than those particular entertainments. That is, if ESP/magic were repeatable with other objects, we could use, for example, the spoon bending skill for other metals and substances in industrial manufacture. Or we could teach quadriplegics how to do small tasks requiring dexterity. Or communicate without telephones. Of course the counterargument which is not a counterargument is the ability of pickpockets to take personal objects without us knowing. Some 'magic' is possible, just not by the purported skills.

What's interesting about the above taxonomy is that most (serious) people don't really believe that any of these phenomena are real. This is counting angels on a pinhead, building castles in the sky. There is no there there. But we've drawn a perfectly coherent picture. And frankly, it could turn out that some of these are physically realizable, through some sort of deterministic, scientific process.

Turing and Kahneman believe wrong things! Sort of, not really.

Andrew Gelman in his blog post Turing and Kahneman and statistical evidence seem to trash the two giants. But really he isn't.

It looks like Alan Turing (AT) supports ESP:

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

And of course ESP is wrong! (By 'wrong' I mean of course that there's lots of evidence against it, despite AT's statement to the contrary).


It also looks like Daniel Kahneman (DK) supports general priming effects age-word priming on walking speed.

When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction is often disbelief . . . The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.

But wait! To their defense! Priming in general is a well established phenomenon, just not in this particular instance. (it just turns out that the age-related priming on gait was a statistical fluke).

The two experts are really just aying that as far as they know, from the data, one might need to believe in implausible things. Science is filled with such implausibilities. Afterall, it doesn't feel like the Earth is turning, the Sun obviously is just moving across the sky. Things are complicated, you have to actually see additional data to be more accurate (Copernicus's model was not as accurate as Ptolemy's when first proposed).