It’s odd that I haven’t seen much skeptical criticism of astrology lately — it’s one pseudoscience that has been laughed into the shadows. On the other hand, I see a lot of flat earth and creationist nonsense, and they’re just as or even more ridiculous as astrology, so I’m curious how nonsense gets promoted or dismissed in popular culture.
It may simply be a matter of what bits of popular culture we choose to read. John Gruber finds an example in the magazine Women’s Health.
So, what makes the Great American Eclipse of April 8, 2024 so special? Ancient astronomers — who, by the way, were also astrologers — believed that the geographical area where any eclipse was visible would energetically feel its effects the most.
Gruber has a nice simple rebuttal.
So here’s my “by the way” retort to Montúfar’s aside: how many astronomers today — not in “ancient” times — are also astrologers? Spoiler: the answer is fucking zero.
How many astronomers believe the Earth is flat? 0. How many physicists believe the Earth is 6,000 years old? Not quite 0, but pretty close. Similarly, how many biologists reject evolution? Again, practically 0, and the exceptions are all driven by weird religious ideologies and make no contribution to science.
Meanwhile, astronomers have discovered a black hole of 33 solar masses a mere 2000 light years away. Isn’t that more interesting than imaginary astrological forces following along in the wake of an eclipse’s shadow?
In yet another discursion, Angela Collier’s latest video (I know, some of my readers don’t care for her, but bear with me) is about the obvious grift of ‘spectacle debates’ in contrast to real scientific debates. She uses as an example the Nye-Ham creationist debate, and I 100% agree with her that that was a terrible debate. You know Ken Ham still brings it up in his talks quite frequently as a triumphant moment for creationism, right?
I laughed when she talked about how Nye just helped Ham pocket $400,000, and did publicity for Ham to get tax-free donations to build an ark and “definitely not private jets or whatever that guy does” because…Ken Ham does have a private jet, one that makes regular, mysterious trips to the Cayman Islands.
It’s a Cessna Citation V, ID N190JK, if you want to keep an eye on it. I wonder what a religious organization is doing making all those flights to well-known tax haven? Perhaps they’re busy converting the natives. Or just socking away all the profits from their spectacle debates and pseudoscience and stupid fake ark tourist trap.
Debates and the danger of pigeon chess. Creationists just poop on the board, knock over the pieces at random, and declare victory. I’m often convinced they don’t believe in the concept of truth.
What the hell does that even mean?
As for the black hole, is it coming to kill us all? Astronomical phenomena are only interesting when they’re coming to kill us all.
And all our fancy “observatories” are helpless and can only watch.
Why bother complaining about him? It’s not as if Ham is ever going to punished for spreading reality-denying ignorance or bilking willfully ignorant Christian trash.
@ ^ Akira MacKenzie : He might however go to jail for trying to avoid paying tax if we’re lucky maybe?
@ 2. feralboy12 : The Black Hole – Gaia-BH3 – is two thousand light yeras so if it wa scoming directly for us – which it almost certainly (99.999999999% & proby more) isn’t then it’d still take at leats 2,000 years to get us.
By which time, sadly, we’ll quite possibly have wiped oursleves out already anyhow.
PS. Clicking the link for the Black Hole in the OP just gets me this :
But this link here via space dot com :
https://www.space.com/milky-way-biggest-stellar-mass-black-hole-gaia
Will hopefully work?
Considering the number of people who travelled to places along the path of totality, I’d say there were plenty of effects, if only the extra exhaust fumes and the sounds of many footsteps.
Heck, where I am, which was listed as “95% totality”, there were plenty of people hanging out with those funny opaque glasses. Yep, there were effects.
Metaphorically speaking a lot of the low hanging fruit have long since gone over-ripe and rotten but have any of them actually completely disappeared yet?
Pardon my incredulity but, HA!
I don’t do “luck,” “fate,” or “the arc of history.” The only way things happen is if you make them happen and no one wants to do that.
Oh, that quote was from StevoR @ 4.
You know, I don’t think neither the ancient astronomers nor the ancient astrologer did believe anything about how things “energetically feel” under an eclipse. That whole energy-feel stuff is modern new age bullshit and not some kind of “ancient wisdom”.
What problem do people here have with Angela Collier? She seems totally fine to me.
Birds aren’t real! You know you want the T-shirt.
Most of Angela Collier’s videos are quite interesting, and to be honest, I quite like her voice.
That said, astrology and alchemy are quite interesting pseudosciences since at least they managed to spawn actual useful science after centuries of refinement.
Creationism on the other hand has always been garbage literal interpretation of a text long believed to be allegorical.
And most pseudosciences are linked to humanity’s bogus pattern recognition. Not sure we could ever get rid of them
How could anyone not care for Angela? She’s delightful.
@ 13
Not with that attitude.
@various re Dr Collier;
I’ve now seen a few minutes each of four of her videos. Personally, I find her style grating* (especially when she’s playing a video game while talking), but mileage varies. If you find her delightfully charming, so be it. But in two of them, she also made glaring physics errors right at or near the start. And she doesn’t seem to take kindly to being corrected.
*pointing that out in another thread led to insinuations of misogyny on my part. I could make a list of men whose style irritates me, but life’s too short…
“the geographical area where any eclipse was visible would energetically feel its effects the most.”
Well duh . . . in the path of the eclipse, solar irradiance would drop to o w/sq m. Where it was partial, irradiance is reduced from normal.
@17, that’s right!
The classical Maya were about the best ancient astronomers, and were definitely not astrologers in the current definition, which is more Egyptian.
The Maya calculated the day and time of every eclipse until the year 3000 AD. They took them to be the sun dying, with possible disaster ahead. The king and queen had to draw their blood onto cloths and burn them to get help from the gods.
Mayans took their sacrifices very seriously, and the most important people had to make the greatest sacrifices. The king had to draw blood by piercing his penis and the queen had to make a hole in her lower lip and draw a rope of thorns through it. So that the gods would know that their requests meant business.
I think that we should bring these practices back, because it’d show who was really serious about going into politics.
«Is astrology low-hanging fruit? How about creationism?»
It’s the rotten fruit in the ground.
I also really enjoyed that video. I learned new things, and she described them well. I plan to watch more from her.
I’m sure Ham flies to the Cayman Islands in his jet to give his money to the poor as the Lord commanded him to do.
By the way, if he’s on the books as a preacher he gets to pay taxes essentially as self-employed so he can write off a lot of expenses like several million dollars to buy a jet and another million a year to operate it.
I may need to change professions. I have some background in the preaching business. My degree in philosophy is from a Southern Baptist college. I was ordained by a local psychic school (really). And, I worked off-and-on some years ago as Zippy the Pinhead. I’m think I’m ready. Where’s my jet?
@acollierastro is one of my most favorite YouTubers. I’m hard of hearing, so I appreciate her clear and easy to understand voice.
Yea, she makes surprising mistakes. She did one vid where she talks about the Faraday effect – how a magnetic field rotates the plane of polarized light – and she shows one of the equations, which shows that the effect is proportional to the wavelength of light. Then she tries to do a demonstration, with a red laser pointer, and it fails (probably because the magnetic field wasn’t strong enough). OK, she has another, brighter laser, a green one… and she’s disappointed that it doesn’t work any better than the red laser. The fact that green light has a shorter wavelength than red light doesn’t seem to occur to her.
But who doesn’t make mistakes? And by the way, talking about a complex subject while playing a video game is all kinds of metal.
According to some of the more hippy-dippy portions of the left, “NO! ESPECIALLY, IF IT DOESN”T MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOURSELF.”
Wanna know of another line of fakery/woo/religious-pseudoscience that needs to be investigated in depth? EXORCISM. That doesn’t get nearly enough attention, probably because too many news outlets are afeared of offending well-heeled religious authoritarians.
When I saw “fucking zero” I immediately went to the over-the-line scene in The Big Lebowski. Smokey, my friend, you’re entering a world of pain.
It’s actually a halo star (or at least the remnant of one) and in a retrograde, high inclination orbit that’s going to take it way outside the galactic plane, so yeah, no threat to us, even in millions of years. Interestingly, it could to be part of a stream of stars formed when a globular cluster merged with the Milky Way’s disk.
I think it was the Shoe comic where Roz was asking someone ‘are you superstitious?’ and the answer was ‘No, that would be bad luck’. Which sums up the gullibility of most of the sheople.
Actually, shermanj, being superstitious can bring bad luck, by diminishing one’s ability to understand and interpret events.
@28 Raging Bee wrote: Actually, shermanj, being superstitious can bring bad luck, by diminishing one’s ability to understand and interpret events.
I reply: I must admit you are right. I didn’t think of that aspect. Thanks for the additional insight.
The above-average mass black hole is interesting, it reminds me of the object in Stanislaw Lem’s SF novel Fiasco – it was not central to the plot, but central for making the interstellar journey time factor plausible.
The world has not one, but two contradictory astrological traditions. The most common has its roots in mesopotamia, the other is rooted in China where the emperors had official astrologers keeping records of the heavens and attempting to predict the future. This variant remains in Asia. The Chinese tradition is using a large number of asterisms unrelated to the constellations used by astrology in the west.
bithrtjohansson @ #31 — “The world has not one, but two contradictory astrological traditions.” I suspect there are…or were…many other astrological type traditions, but there are two based on the Mesopotamian system. Sidereal astrology takes into account the precession of the equinoxes so it uses the contemporary position of the planets with respect to the stars. Most astrology that you see in the newspapers is based on the Tropical system even though the Sun is no where near the 1st degree of the constellation of Aries at the Spring equinox. You know, “this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”
I believe India has an indigenous astrological system unrelated to either Chinese or Mesopotamian astrology.
Steve Morrison @ #33 — Per the Wiki there are several forms of astrology in India, but there’s some thought that some astrology in India was influenced by the Hellenistic astrology, which was probably influenced by Mesopotamian systems.
Japan has an astrological system, based somewhat on Chinese influence. However, this paragraph caught my attention because it highlights just how awful these unscientific ideas can be: “In Japan, strong belief in astrology has led to dramatic changes in the fertility rate and the number of abortions in the years of Fire Horse. Adherents believe that women born in hinoeuma [Fire Horse] years are unmarriageable and bring bad luck to their father or husband. In 1966, the number of babies born in Japan dropped by over 25% as parents tried to avoid the stigma of having a daughter born in the hinoeuma year.” The Fire Horse year occurs every 60 years, and in the article on the Fire Horse year it says, ” According to a superstition, girls born in such a year will grow up to kill their husbands.”
I was wondering about a seafaring people like the Norse. Surely they used the stars to navigate their world. Don’t know if this valid but according to the “Norse Mythologist” website, the Norse signs were based on the date of your birth which assigned one of 24 “birth runes” to you while the time of day you were born assigned your “solar rune”. The site says, “Your fate is predetermined the day you are born, and there is no changing course. Using Norse runes can help you understand your character and your fate, but there is little you can do to change it.” If there’s no changing course, you have to wonder why bother.
“According to a superstition, girls born in such a [Fire Horse] year will grow up to kill their husbands.”
Well, yeah, if such a girl is surrounded by people who believe that shit, and treat her as a pariah for that reason, and no man wants to touch her except for losers who can’t get anyone “better” to marry them, and she and everyone else knows 24/7 that she was never her husband’s first or best choice…sooner or later something will snap and she’s likely to kill her husband. That there’s what’s called “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
@ ^ & 28. Raging Bee : “Actually, shermanj, being superstitious can bring bad luck, by diminishing one’s ability to understand and interpret events.”
Yup and superstition can be a “self- fulfilling prophecy” too by making people nervous and behave differently and less confidently or expect things to go wrong and change their behaviour to make things going wrong more likely or simply see something go wrong later and wrongly attribute it to the superstition despite no causal connection.
@27. shermanj : “I think it was the Shoe comic where Roz was asking someone ‘are you superstitious?’ and the answer was ‘No, that would be bad luck’. Which sums up the gullibility of most of the sheople.”
I’ve been using that line as a funny self-refuting / contradicting statement / joke for a while. Is that where it comes from? Cool. Thanks.
Apparently not. They were very smart about using the Sun for navigation, even on very cloudy days and during the long twilight hours before sunrise and after sunset in the northern latitudes in the summer sailing season. They typically dropped sail and drifted during the nights.
Most of their trade routes were close to land or river based, so it was only during their trips west to Iceland, Greenland and North America that navigation using the skies was critical.
Astrology seems distressingly popular in some queer circles. It’s really frustrating
@38 StevoR, your use of that saying pre-dates the use I found at https://www.gocomics.com/shoe/2024/04/13 so we’re still looking for its origin.
Another rather childish version is “santa clause isn’t real, the easter bunny told me” (groan)
But, seriously, based on what a math professor related to me, astronomy seems loosely linked to astrology in a manner similar to the relationship between chemistry and alchemy. (I don’t think he dot get that from a tarot reading)
@40 dangerousbeans wrote: Astrology seems distressingly popular in some queer circles. It’s really frustrating
I reply: You are right. It is part of the wide range of superstitious beliefs (propaganda) that sooo many take as fact. Which circles back to PZ’s title ‘Is astrology low-hanging fruit? How about creationism?’
robro@35: I’m not a specialist in norse mythology, but I’m doubtfull about that birth rune stuff.
AFAIK the finer details of skandinavian faith and ritual have long been lost and all runic systems for magic and oracle I know of are modern inventions.
@ 16 Rob Grigjanis
Look I could be wrong that an old man showing an intense dislike of a young woman whose career has already eclipsed his has something to do with her gender. All I will say is that it’s funny that when old men are the subject of insinuations of misogyny they always assure us they would say exactly the same about a man – but by some freak of statistical improbability, are only observed doing so with women. :-/
IIRC, what you said at the time was that her moderating your YouTube comment on her channel instead of responding was “unacceptable”, which was very funny. How dare the little miss be so disrespectful!
Anyway, it wasn’t only Grigjanis who took a dislike to AC. Stevo doesn’t like her because she made fun of space elevators. And Stevo is a space enthusiast. Morales doesn’t like her because I defended her. And Morales is a troll – so naturally he must take the contrary position. X-D
Astrology is distressingly popular in all kinds of circles across the political spectrum. Around a quarter of all American Christians believe in it to some extent (not really surprising though since conservative Christians especially are an incredibly superstitious bunch).
Pretty sure it’s because it claims to demonstrate there’s some form of agency involved in the direction of our lives. Most people hate the idea that much of what happens in the world is completely unguided and down to random chance.
Silentbob @43: I would hope her career has eclipsed my own brief physics career. I had to quit due to ill health three years after my PhD. Still, your source is questionable. I had about a dozen publications.
But somehow, I didn’t forget (as Collier seemed to) what I learned as an undergraduate. It’s OK. I don’t expect someone like you – apparently both ignorant and incurious about physics and mathematics – to understand my technical criticisms of her .
As for “only observed doing so with women”, you mean observed by you? Or noticed by you? In these very pages I have excoriated the styles and errors made by Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson, to mention only two of the more illustrious. Maybe that was just antisemitism/racism?
She didn’t ‘moderate’ my comment. And I wouldn’t have cared if she had simply not responded to it. She deleted it, and blocked me from further comments. No big deal to me, but that speaks volumes about her character,
euclide@13–
I would call astrology and alchemy protosciences up to the 15th century or so, after which they became increasingly pseudoscientific. Astrology as it appears in today’s media probably doesn’t even deserve to be called a pseudoscience. It’s just superstitious nonsense that can churn a profit.
[Obsession manifest]
A blatant falsehood, of course.
What a fatuous claim.
I am, of course, not a troll and even were I one, I’d need not take the contrary position.
By the way, the legend that Dr Collier played a video game while explaining the entire history of string theory is absolutely true! And she smashed the game! X-D
I don’t know what level of misogyny it takes to think this is a mark against her instead of an opportunity to do a Wayne’s World style “we are not worthy”, but apparently some elderly gents see things differently.
Here’s the actual video. Astonishing stuff.
Silentbob @48: You really are a nasty, pathetic little clown. As I made quite clear, it is something I personally find annoying. As I also said, mileage varies. Apparently you’re one of those stunted fools who think there’s something wrong with people who don’t share their tastes.
Also, Siggy is neither elderly nor a misogynist.
You’ll also notice a weird absence of female Dr Collier haters. I wouldn’t read anything into it though. I’m sure it’s pure coincidence.
@31. birgerjohansson : “The world has not one, but two contradictory astrological traditions.”
As #32 robro et al & #33. Steve Morrison have noted already, there’s definitley more than just two. Many cultures have developed their own cosmogonynies and astrologies – see wikipage here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astrological_traditions,_types,_and_systems
Note that that wikipage says the list is incomplete.
@41. shermanj :
Pretty sure I didn’t come up with that myslf but read it somewhere and so can’t take credit. My google fu has failed me just now and trying to track it down although it has suggested Andrew W. Mathis whoever he was / is ( https://allauthor.com/quotes/66659/ ) Surprisingly no luck with Quote Investigator yet.
@43. Silentbob : “Anyway, it wasn’t only Grigjanis who took a dislike to AC. Stevo doesn’t like her because she made fun of space elevators. And Stevo is a space enthusiast.”
Something I gather we have in common here – enthusiasm for space.traveland exploration. Folks that wish too can read the thread in question here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/09/24/synchronicity-is-just-another-word-for-coincidence/
With my discussion of the video in the OP and its flaws starting from #131 onwards (initially commented at #70 but hadn’t seen the video at that point) with my deconstruction of it as I watched -which i found to be a chore going in comments #132-133 #141, #149-150. My concluions from watching that video :
AC seemd to have NOT done her research there onthe space elevator concept. Sur eshe’s a nic eand charming enough personand nothing against her personally FWIW.
I didn’t watch the whole of the video in the post because I found her voice irritating, it seemed somewhat fundie baby, and because up until the point she stopped she hadn’t said anything that was new to me, so I got bored. And just for the record I am female.
@13 euclide
The main issue isn’t pattern recognition per se, but that the average person is a complete moron and half of us are even stupider than that.
^ PS. That Space Elevator video is the only one of Angela Collier’s that’ve seen – at least that I can recall now. I haven’t yet seen her video linked in the OP here although I hope to do so sometime later. Yes, like everyone, I have my personal biases and stylistic prewferences and art, of course, is subjective. I don’t think its necessarily “misogynist” to criticise someone for their youtube clips not being accurate or well-researched or containing factual errors or for simply finding somebody annoying. If others enjoy her videos then I’ve no problem with that or with them doing so and liking and even recommending them to me. We’re obvs not going to agree on space elevators but I’m certainly not boycotting or opposed to her or telling others they shouldn’t watch & follow her.
FWIW, no doubt very little, personally one of my all time fave science communicators is Dr Becky (astrophysicist Dr B Smethurst – see : https://www.youtube.com/@DrBecky ) who is a cis woman and excellent science communicator whose channel I follow closely and love.
@ 50. Silentbob : I wouldn’t call myself a “hater” of Dr Collier. I’ve only seen one video of hers and didn’t agree with it and found it lacking for the reasons noted in the thread here linked in my #51. Other than that & what I’ve read here I know nothing else about her.
@39. tacitus : The Polynesians OTOH..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation#Navigation_by_the_stars
Wow. I just watched the video where PZ cued it up and it’s phenomenally good. It’s a polemic about ignorance and communicating science but very engaging and persuasive. If you weren’t impressed by Dr Collier before this, it might change your mind.
I see why PZ posted it despite some grumps in his audience
I like to snark that I don’t believe in astrology because I am a Scorpio.
@57 Nathaniel Hellerstein wrote: I don’t believe in astrology because I am a Scorpio.
I reply: But, my friend Patty says she’s a capricorn and she doesn’t believe in astrology, either, but has it on good authority that all those that are taurus do! But, I say that’s bull.
Silentbob @56
Maybe if you have no knowledge of science history, but I do have some, taught as I was taught biology, chemistry and physics at school. And as I said I stopped because apart from her fundie baby voice she was boring me. I’m not grumpy, I am bored, see the difference?
Okay, just watched the Angela Collier video now. Certainly better than her Space Elevator one and parts of it were pretty good but not blown away by it. A few notes :
Who came up with atomic theory? AC says between Dalton and Bernoulli, Maxwell, Boltzmann but, er, Democritus pre-dated them all by centuries. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus )
At the 15 mins the breifly flashed hard to read odd font & spacing “In Vienna” thing was annoying. AC could’ve left it up longer and made it more readable since I had to repeatedly stop & go back and try to work out what it was saying which broke the flow. Also she was just talking about 1880’s – 1890’s but had earlier referenced a paper from 1907 and so there’s some temporal confusion caused there. (There’s a few other points where the small insets could have been larger and on-screen for longer and would’ve worked better.)
AC’s pronunciation of “Plonk” instead of “Plan-kh” for Planck bugged me a bit but minor thing.She might even be right there, I dunno. Hmm.. Lessee : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck Nah, the audio file version there says its “Plank” not “plonk.”
AC references the 1860 evolution debate between Samuel Wilberforce & Thomas Huxley but she doesn’t name either and dismisses it a bit too glibly in my view. In fairness, she does quickly (blink & you’ll miss it) show the wikipage but she also doesn’t really quote Huxley’s famously attributed remark .that “..he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.” Which is a long way from her claim that Huxley’s response was “You’re a loser and that’s a stupid thing to say!” In fairness, the debate wasn’t recorded verbatim and accounts on exact wordings used differ but still. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Oxford_evolution_debate )
I also think that whilst Angela Collier makes some good points esp re elevating issues raised by whackjobs and implying both sides are equal or equally valuable and can be used for grifting, this is overgeneralising and, as she notes, there’s a place for debates on some notably political issues. I don’t think its always true that evrybody going to these sort of debates has always made their minds up beforehand or that even “spectacle debates” can’t ever do some good. I do think its a good point that people’s human rights eg equal marriage,
abortionthe right to control one’s own body are NOT topics that should be up for debate or question but that’s slightly different from saying all “spectacle debates” as she termed them are like that. Or that all such debates amount to people be insulting and shouting at each other abusively which a good debate shouldn’t be or certainly shouldn’t just be about with each side raising different arguments and points and evidence and getting people to hopefully think and reconsider their views.I guess it then comes down to some topics can be debated – Dark Matter, what those spiral nebuale in the sky really are, who will make a better president, which Trek version is best etc.. whereas others things can’t be.Overall, I found Angela Collier’s Long live scientific debate video here meandering, overly long and at times annoying but with some very good sections and some good points raised altough little I’ve not heard before and a bit disjointed. Could’ve benefitted from some editing to tighten it up, remove repetitions and maybe lose the Boltzman book review and focus more on the contrast between scientific vs spectacle debates. But it was okay and did have its strong points and sections that did powerfully make her case too. I certainly didn’t hate it and find it as objectionable as her Space Elevator one and, ok, that one probly did bias me against her some.