I'm an atheist but why on earth are zodiac signs so accurate?

Haha, confirmation bias

I just read the traits a leo is supposed to have.
Half of them contradict each other, and they are written in a way that almost anyone would identify with some of them.
It is a load of Hundescheiße.

Astrology is just about as accurate as coincidence. After all, I suppose everyone must believe in something.

No, it’s not real.

At one point I pulled up my natal chart and an analysis of it, copy/pasted it onto here, and then used the cross out function to emphasize anything that I felt didn’t match me.

It ended up being more than ⅔ of the thing, and the rest was so vague it could apply to anyone.

That’s the essence of confirmation bias. You pay attention to what resonates with you, and ignore the rest.

There’s nothing special about the orientation of the stars and planets at the time and place of your birth that can or will predict your past, present, or future.

Besides the mentioned confirmation bias, there may be something about birth month and personality/mental health, although the effect would only be visible in large-scale analysis. You wouldn’t notice it. I only mention it because even if there were some differences among people born at different times of the year, we needn’t assign some kind of mystical star mechanism to explain it.

Would that be birth month or birth climate? Because December in New York City is way different than December in Sydney, Australia.

Could be your parents have personality traits where they favor screwing more during certain seasons. That’s somewhat genetic and heritable.

Because that shit’s so vague it could apply to anyone.

But how come all of my 18 closest friends are either Virgo or Aquarius?

This

I’m scorpio…surprise

@dopeguru “But how come all of my 18 closest friends are either Virgo or Aquarius?”

Because you buy into superficiality and fixate on coincidence? Seriously, if you have 18 “closest friends” then those friendships can’t be that meaningful.

Bears mentioning that Virgo and Scorpio cover September and October. Look at what happens 9 months before that. New Year’s and Valentine’s Day.

Shocker.

@Darth_Algar I’m close with all my friends. I don’t have any other friends beside them, so I counted all of the people I know and talk to. But the best friends I have are all 4 virgo chicks.

It’s basic psychology, same scam that psychics pull.

@Seek, I don’t know a whole lot about personalized star charts, but to address your question about December in NY vs. Australia; I know they specifically ask what time zone you were in and exactly what time you were born, so evidently that is taken into account.

@Jak – My question was related to the study in @DoNotKnowMuch ‘s link.

Here’s a good test of the zodiac:

In high school my physics & chemistry teacher asked for our birthdays. The next day he passed out folded papers to everyone. Then he said, “I printed out your horoscopes for yesterday. Read it and raise your hand if you think it was right.” A lot of the class raised their hands.

Next he said, “I gave you all the same horoscope.”

Here endeth the lesson.

I apologize.

Time zones have nothing to do with the six month season difference between the hemispheres.

Here is the comprehensive horoscope for 2016

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. That being said. IMO being born at different times of our planets position in the heavens having slightly different idiosyncrasies is plausible to me. But I don’t think astrology, in its current use is an accurate science.
Perhaps if there was a personality test given to lots of people and you used all their birthdays to try and see similar traits in people born in similar times it would show some validity. I’m currently unaware of such a study, or its authenticity, or credibility.

It’s not accurate. The apparent “accuracies” can probably be chalked up to chance—may seem like too much of a coincidence, may feel like it can’t be random… but that’s more because our intuition of what random looks like isn’t correct. A statistician (I can’t remember his name) was interviewed on a podcast. He explained that he can take two groups and ask them to record a series of heads and tails from a coin flip. One group has an actual coin and records the first 100 flips. The other is coinless, and simply makes up a series of a 100 flips, trying to make it look random. He walks out of the room, they make their recordings, and he comes back to look at each series without knowing which is whose. He is always able to point to the actual random pattern—it will have stretches of 14 or so heads in a row, say, where the human-crafted “random” series will never have heads flip much more than say 7 in a row before going back to tails. He explained the actual statistical likelihood of such long strings—it is actually highly probable in flips of 100—but I don’t remember the actual mathematics. Anyway, the experiment highlights how our intuitive expectations of how random events unfold doesn’t necessarily line up to how they actually do. You could, just by random chance, have friends that are only of a certain star sign or two. Add to that factors like potentially uneven birthrates, and people tending to gravitate towards others with apparent similarities (like feeling closer to someone who shares your name, etc., even though it makes no logical difference.), and it seems like there are many more probable and simple explanations than one that depends on the influence of cosmic entities at birth.

I seem to be the inverse of your experience. My sign’s Capricorn. I don’t match its description—in vague descriptions I fit some of the adjectives and not others. In more specific descriptions, it veers farther away from how people describe me and how I’d describe myself. I like the sea-goat, and I like garnets, and I’ve always liked Saturn (even before I knew it was my sign’s planet), so I’m aesthetically pleased with it, but that’s it.

Looking up the star signs of people close to me… My best friend is Gemini, and so are the two roommates I’ve become close friends with this year. My sister is Aries, and my mom is Libra. My best friend growing up, who I’m getting back in touch with after several years of disconnect, is a Leo. I get along wonderfully with all of these people, yet looking up our compatibility online, it appears that we’re not supposed to get along at all. Then, there’s a certain person in my life that I do not get along well with at all. They’re Taurus, a sign with which I am supposed to be very compatible.

Really, I think it’s just random, and sometimes fun coincidences emerge.

Coincidence. Pure and simple.

It works, but not for the reason most people believe. I’m a Jungian mystic and a professional tarot reader. I always make clear to querents before I do a reading that what I do is a form of applied psychology and has nothing to do with the supernatural. Astrology, like tarot, works on the basis of apophenia, the tendency for the human brain to find patterns in things, even when there is no inherent pattern. The interesting thing about this is that if your brain can’t find a pattern, you will project a pattern from your own subconscious. You can test this by staring at a TV screen showing snow; stare for long enough and you’ll start seeing geometric shapes – Platonic solids – in the static. These shapes originate in your own subconscious mind.

A skilled astrologer or tarot reader is not reading the star charts or the cards, they’re reading your reactions. When I do a reading, I allow myself to drop into a light trance and use my subconscious to pick up cues in the form of body language, word choices, eye movements, and so on, to determine how the querent is reacting to the very generic, universally applicable archetypal meanings on the cards, then begin zeroing in on more and more specific meanings by playing a game of hotter-and-colder. What I’m doing is essentially the same thing as psychoanalytic reflection, repeating back to people exactly what it is that they’re telling me. Even when I’ve explained to people how the process works – and that tarot is useless for telling the future but very, very good at picking up what’s going on below the surface in the subconscious – many people are creeped out by how accurate the reading is.

I enjoy Tarot as a way to hack my own brain.

Actually just got a new deck and I’m really excited about it.

Smashthestate, so you’re referring to ‘cold reading?’

“Time zones have nothing to do with the six month season difference between the hemispheres”
I never said that they did. The time zone and time of birth allow the astrologer, or an astronomer for that matter, to tell the exact position of the stars in the sky at the time of birth.

Except that the Southern hemisphere has a completely different sky than the Northern hemisphere. Oddly enough, I’ve never heard of the Australian Zodiac.

I read somewhere that the Aborigines sought out patterns in the void between the stars.

@MrGrimm888 Correct. What I do is the same thing phony psychics use: cold reading. The difference is that I’m not trying to fool anyone into believing I have exclusive access to the spirits or the fates. The interesting thing is that I love doing readings on skeptics because they’re so easy to read. The harder they try to hide their subconscious reactions, the stronger they end up projecting them. Some of the best readings I’ve ever done have been on people who asked for readings in the sure belief that I was a fraud and a phony and just wanted to show me up. Some of them were left shaken and visibly disturbed by how accurate the reading was, even though I repeatedly assured them that I hadn’t done anything supernatural, psychic, or paranormal.

Smashthestate, thank you for your honesty. I only hope you use this power to manipulate the sheep in a non-profit way.

As much as I enjoy the psychological analysis I find that each and every sign of the Zodiac assign a specific and typical personalities for those who reside within specific Zodiac. Most sites will give you the specific personalities assigned to your specific Zodiac. There must be a good reason why most sources assigned the same personalities to specific Zodiac, not simply putting all diverse personalities in all Zodiac signs.

I personally find my Zodiac reading as accurate and relatable, which is also reflected by the reality and people around me that fall under specific Zodiac category. Perhaps it’s accurate because people have historically researched the relations between specific Zodiac with specific personalities as well as the definition of a particular Zodiac. You can consider Zodiac reading as the strange, additional, alternative cousin of scientific personality test.

In my lifetime, about 120 people have attempted to guess my sign. About ten of them got it right! Amazing, huh?

I was born in the House of Pisces, ruled by Venus. I suppose that means women will always play a dominant role in my life.

Funny. I find myself unhappily less restrained since Madame Modérateur A, notre Dame aimée du Fouet has been less active.

Is a God required for zodiac? I thought Atheists just didn’t believe in any Gods. Does it also mean they can’t believe in mysterious unseen forces that claim to accurately depict destiny? Is an Atheist prevented from believing in miracles even if a God played no part in them?

I thought the term for that was Skeptic. Not the same as Atheist. Aren’t there any gullible Atheists out there?