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Mad Laddicus
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Reminder that there used to be a $1,000,000 prize available for anyone who could display any sort of supernatural powers that remained unclaimed for 20 years. The challenge rules required that both parties agree upon the test setup, and several people actually tried to claim it and all failed. It astounds me that anyone still believes in this nonsense and that it seems to be becoming even more popular to believe in literal magic and other supernatural idiocy.
Everyone should read about James Randi he was a brilliant skeptic.
And he did special effects for Alice Cooper!
Also friend of Penn and Teller. Just a great guy all around.
There was that guy who could make almost anyone forget almost anything, he won the prize many times. :D
There is actually an X-Men who has this exact power.
I am at the point where if anyone, ever, for any reason, asks me what my astrological sign is, I stop communicating with them.
They always turn out to be irresponsible, narcissistic idiots every time.
An exception would be if this interaction is taking place completely within the confines of an actually defined fantasy world like a video game or ttrpg.
But real life? People who actually believe there is, or could potentially be anything to astrology?
Dangerous morons.
devil's advocate: there are people like me who don't take it seriously. like I enjoy talking to astrology people because listening to anyone talk about anything they're interested in is downright entertaining, even if I personally don't believe planetary positions have any influence on humans
Astrology has one major and tangible benefit - it lets you easily remember when roughly are people's birthdays coming up.
I'm not gonna tell you that you shouldn't talk to, or shouldn't enjoying talking to astrology people.
I just have a lower threshold for bs I put up, and do not personally enjoy listening to enthusiastic yapping about absurd nonsense, I infact fact it insufferable, assuming it isn't a child who is in the learning/development process.
Were you and I to be friends, irl or otherwise, I'd respectfully ask you to not waste my time with astrology, unless you want to have a meta or academic level discussion about ... the psych tendencies/profiles of astrology believers, the actual real world history of its growth and development (which is very often completely different than what many astrology practitioners believe), how you can track the general decline of literacy and critical thinking skills and the education system by using the proliferation of astrology as a proxy...
... I would find those topics interesting.
But generally speaking, in an irl, casual conversation scenario?
Yeah my rule of thumb is that if we are just recently met and you are ardently asking me what my sign is, you're a person I would rather not know at all.
Nothing wrong with having a filter. I suppose mine is that I won't be friends with anyone who insists on contact through social media apps instead of regular texting (maybe Signal if they're cool)
I also have that same additional filter as well, haha.
Maybe... we could... be friends lol?
I am so very tired of trying to explain how awful social media apps are to everyone, how they don't realize they're addicted to a digital drug that makes them angry, depressed and misinformed...
And then you also try to explain how to actually do online security, and they usually get angry when you tell them that all the marketing and advertisments lied to them.
Probably lol. I'd wager most of us Lemmy dorks would get along with most of us Lemmy dorks IRL or otherwise
I suppose Lemmy is social media but its non-monetary, completely-volunteer-run nature really does make it feel like a different animal. At least I'm not horribly addicted like I used to be with Reddit, anyway
Astrology is really dumb. I do have one curiosity with it. It's a big deal for hockey players to be born early in the year to the point you find fewer pros born in December and in the later months compared to January through March born hockey professionals.
One other thing, kids have birthdays every year and if they have their parties outside that means some kids are having snowy birthday parties and others are having sunny birthdays and plenty of crossover. The kinds of interactions you have with your friends will be slightly impacted* by how much outdoor gear you have to wear, etc. (*maybe imperceptibly)
But the point is there are at least two possible differences that come depending on which month you're born in. What if there are like a hundred of them and astrology is a really terrible way of trying to figure that out? Now I realize it's not so maybe a better question is I wonder if there is any version of birth month based assessments, correlations, or analyses that might be fruitful or useful in some way or another.
Ok you seem genuienly curious here, lemme try.
So, yes, you are correct that the season you are born in will slightly effect the number of seasons a kid experiences.
But uh... what if you are born in a tropical monsoon climate that has no winter?
What if you are born in the other hemisphere, where the seasons are inverted?
What if you can't afford a house, so you don't have a yard for parties, don't live near a park... or hockey rink?
And the biggest one: what do the actual stars have to do with this?
Say earth and the whole solar system are poofed out of the Milky Way, and into Andromeda. Solar system remains stable, all orbits the same, the Sun's massive solar wind is strong enough to protect us from the ambient radiation of wherever we end up.
Seasons will be exactly the same. Stars will be dramatically different. ... Do you think the stars being different would change... anything?
Beyond that, even back here on normal, real Earth, in the Milky Way... most Eastern astrology is based on the year you are born in. Not the month.
And also, throughout history.... various cultures have kept a calendar, kept track of time... in many different ways. Solar calendars. Lunar calendars. Calendars based on the reigns of Emperors or Dynasties, calendars based off of mythical/religious stories for the origin of the universe/planet.
They also have not all recognized the same constellation patterns... as what we now recognize them as.
If you're in the Southern hemisphere... you can't even see many of the ones we see in the North.
...
You can try and number crunch statistical correlations between every possible variable.
Sometimes this can lead to an insight.
But to nail down why that correlation exists, to actually discover something true and useful... you also have to provide a causal mechanism that makes sense.
The object close enough to meaningfully directly affect Earth is the Moon. It causes tides, for example, alters many animal behaviors.
The only other thing is the Sun, of course, which gives the planet light and energy.
Nothing else inside of or outside of our solar system has any mechanism of directly impacting life on Earth in a regular, noticeable way...
... unless we get astounsingly unlucky and get hit by the radiation from a magnetar we somehow haven't noticed yet, or something absurd like that.
We of tend play choose your horoscope at work. We gather free or paid newspaper and around a coffee we read the horoscopes and chose the best or the funnier.
I've worked as a copy editor for a small newspaper.
You wanna know how the horoscopes are written?
Lead editor pulls them out of his ass, often laughing while doing so.
They tended to be based on the plots of, or scenes in movies he'd recently seen, shows he was watching.
I'm not even kidding, this guy would also bombard me with variations of the GI Joe 'porkchop sandwiches' memes, in all likelihood was an editor by day, 4chan shit poster by night.
My god did that smell good
My wife makes a newspaper about me for my birthday every year. She makes the horoscopes too and that's one of the most entertaining parts for her.
Yeah and since we laugh reading them, we do full circle XD
Yep they are literally complete bullshit and you have to be an actual moron to take them seriously...
Also I edited in more to my original comment after you replied, did not expect you to reply so fast, haha.
He I see, yeah that what i though, their can't be science behind this. I wonder when we will start to get "AI" horoscopes.
(I am waiting to enter a music festival, nothing more to do than speak or argue with people)
There are various complex systems, calculations, tables and such that people use... but there is absolutely no actual empirical science that backs up any of any of them.
Therr are no plausible causal mechanisms.
There is also an immense wealth of scientific evidence showing how the predictions are uselessly inaccurate, as well as a bunch of other studies explaining how and why such vaguely worded predictions are convincing to certain kinds of people.
If there is any science to astrology, it is a science of being a scam artist, of psychological manipulation tactics.
As for the actual purported mechanisms of generating a horoscope, they often have psuedoscientific levels of complexity that fools rubes who cannot think critically:
Its complex, and I had to learn it, therefore it's true and worthwhile!
Nevermind that it often doesn't even make testable, falsifiable predictions, and when it does, they are not accurate, they are wrong.
Throw it out like we did with bloodletting, 'body humors', 'vitalism', trying to solve disease with sacrifices and prayer, Lamarckian evolution, etc...
What if real life is a video game?
Then astrology would be the equivalent of an entire belief system that functionally is so complex it essentially contitutes a religion...
Astrology would be that, but built on urban legend, pre-internet era myths about older video games, like Mew being in the back of a truck in Vermillion city.
It would be fake cheat codes that don't work.
Sooooo
Your sign? :)
Ophiuchus is usually my answer
This is the funny troll answer that tests whether or not the astrologer has modern, up to date levels of dedication to their woo woo bs.
Blawcked!
You sound like such a typical Leo
grumble grumble...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=75g0fjX0r4s
You're lucky I have a thing for classic rock.
With pipe organs.
Ah yes James Randi, a man I have very mixed feelings on. He was a climate skeptic who would claim to have debunked people who never signed up for his challenge. A real scum bag in general. He was also a high School drop out with no training in the sciences.
Admittedly he called himself an "Honest Liar" and was motivated not by money but out of fear that people believed he had magic back when he was a magician.
Still given his character I tend not to take JREF too seriously.
I think the case for climate skeptic is a bit overblown. In his own words:
http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/806-i-am-not-qdenyingq-anything.html
The relevant quote:
Not sure what to make of the claim that he debunked people who never signed up for his challenge. There are a number of psychics and others that he has debunked that never signed up for the challenge (for example Uri Geller or Sylvia Browne) which this could be referring to, and I feel are valid debunking.
I could show quite a few unflattering articles about Randi's controversies but I feel his supporters insist that the fact that the challenge existed was the end all be all. In and of itself.
When one must realize that Randi's big claim to fame was the million dollar challenge and without that he had nothing.
Critical thinking should tell you quite simply that JREF's donations required appealing to skeptics. If Randi went to bat for anything that seemed supernatural his fans would turn on him, and if his big claim to fame was an unwinnable contest then his bread and butter demanded that he never allowed the contest to be won.
It's that simple.
Now one could say that he'd get famous and rich for confirming Magick exists but.. why would he? The papers would talk about the psychic not the foundation and further studies couldn't be done at JREF because it wasn't a scientific research facility and James had no training in science at all...
It merely had people who were trained to look out for things like cold reading and the like.
There's nothing to gain and everything to lose and the fact that 99% of people who applied to challenge were turned down and 0% of those who did even got past so much as a preliminary round. Well it's a little sus.
Now I'm not saying magic is out there and JREF is hiding it. If it were then JREF wouldn't have the means to hide it.
What I am saying is JREF and James Randi were not scientists they were showmen and that's very important to keep in mind.
Sharing The idea that you can debunk a phenomenon by yelling "FAKE!" And doing a smug dance is something that offers more harm than good imho. Especially when you get people like Anti-Vaxxers who Mimic this behavior though rallying against medicine instead of faith and folklore.