Astrology Is Scientific
Sunday Shorts (25W27): 20250706
✨ This is not financial advice. 🌸💖🌷 ✨
Things I’ve consumed
I read these throwbacks on how “the heart has reasons reasons know not” ♥︎ Also, OpenAI: ngmi. Just kidding! I can’t predict the future. I would bet on Google, though. This is not financial advice. But maybe buy Google stock. Just kidding! I can’t predict the future.
Things I did
Buy Google stock. Just kidding! Or am I?
Is astrology real?
I’ve noticed that people too often name something a “science” – or “not a science” – to justify their own preconceived biases with perceived intellectual weight. I’m not a scientific expert on what is or isn’t a science, but somebody once told me science can be falsified. I agree with this quote from a Harvard economics Professor Gregory Mankiw that attempts to define “science”:
Scientists observe the world. They develop theories that aim to explain what they see. They collect data to test their theories and reject those that don’t conform to the data. They try their best to put aside ideological preferences and preconceived notions. Most important, they always remain open to changing their minds when presented with better theories or new data. This approach can be applied whether one is studying apples falling from a tree or gross domestic product fluctuating over time. As Albert Einstein put it: “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”
Recently, I realized that I disbelieved astrology simply because I’ve heard people say, “Astrology is not science”. But this is not very scientific of me. In the name of better science, I present my more scientific, introductory1 literature review of astrology.
What is astrology?
Astrology is a system of beliefs and practices that uses celestial events to understand human affairs or terrestrial events. It is a multi-cultural phenomenon that includes both Eastern and Western practices. I primarily focus on contemporary Western astrology, which is often associated with Zodiac signs and horoscopes that purports to use positions of celestial objects to predict significant events and identify a person’s personality.
Despite astrology being recognized as a pseudoscience, over a fourth2 of Americans believe in astrology, and this number could be higher globally3. Belief in astrology has gaps that exist between demographic groups, e.g. income (lower at 37% versus higher at 16%) or age (younger higher than older) or gender (women at 35% versus men at 18%).
So…why do women believe in astrology?
I don’t know, maybe astrology works better for women than for men4, but I’ve heard the following clusters of reasons for why people generally believe in astrology:
People want to make certainty out of uncertainty.
The Barnum (or Forer) effect exists, so people agree with vague statements that apply to a broad range of people. “You sometimes feel misunderstood.”
People don’t believe they control their own destiny or have free will or take agency or something.
There are strong cultural or media influences.
There are gender norms that make it more acceptable for some people to believe in astrology over others.
It’s fun to predict the seemingly unpredictable.
The younger generations are also famously fans of astrology. One of my favorite art projects is MSCHF drop #8, the astrology trading app Bull & Moon. After all, why not? Astrology is a subset of mass psychology, much like investing. This apparently has broad Gen Z appeal (and this sounds like the type of thing you can easily quantifiably verify). Since Mercury is ✨ not ✨ in retrograde, maybe consider buying Google stock! Or some zodiac cryptocurrencies! This is not financial advice.
Astrologists can be helpful by being good at describing the human psyche and steering people towards positive directions. One also could draw similarities between astrology and religion, which is a key contributor to happiness. But considering the difficulties in becoming an astrologer, maybe there’s something to astrology.
So…is astrology scientific?
Yes, I don’t know, probably by some definition of “scientific”. I don’t presume to know the “actual” definition of “science”. But even if astrology is not currently scientific, I don’t see how it can’t *become* scientific by evolving over time based on new findings. Like, there’s plenty of “scientifically recognized” research on the effects of birth months. For example, you can simply imagine replacing this “scientific study” from Columbia University on the relationship between birth months and health with zodiac signs and health. Maybe I don’t know enough about astrology to know that this could be an illegal astrological practice, but I also don’t know enough about astrology to know that this is impossible. But in the same way that the drug thalidomide that caused severe birth defects in Walter White’s son was scientific, it’s important to note that “science” need not always be correct.
I spent merely a few hours reading about astrology or the meta-comments in the discipline.
27%
I really could not find anything reliable. Gemini tells me “25% to 50%”, but I can believe that astrology is more deeply embedded in some cultures, e.g. India or China.
Sarcasm…