Skeptic article - Gary P Posner 1 by Mike http://members.aol.com/garypos/Your_Sign.html Here is an extract: The students, thinking that they were each reading their own personalized horoscopes, marveled at how Jillson knew things about themselves that no one else could possibly know! But they all, male and female, were reading the same horoscope, that of someone described by Jillson as "enormously bright . . . [with] sexual charisma . . . great charm . . . a sense of moral propriety . . . [who] may know celebrities . . ." Stossel thought that Jillson may have incorrectly assumed the birth information to have been his own. But Jillson's one-size-fits-all unisex horoscope was actually based on the birth information of mass murderer Edmund Kemper III who, in addition to many other "charming" deeds, had cut off his mother's head and used it as a dartboard! Quote Tue Jul 24, 2007 11:10 pm
2 by Morpheus I dont know how to respond to this article. There is one astrologer who is trying her best to legitimize (scietifically)her practice on the basis of her poorly understood scientific principles and there is other who wrote a general and a flattering report. . It might have made the murderer much happy, if s/he is alive. Regards Morpheus https://horusastropalmist.wordpress.com/ Quote Tue Jul 24, 2007 11:32 pm
3 by Ficina Natal astrology is an ideal target for sceptics due to people's gullibility. It would be far more difficult for them to attack or ridicule mundane astrology. Quote Wed Jul 25, 2007 8:23 am
4 by Deb These tests rely on people making fools of themselves, and the only thing they demonstrate is that some people are gullible. Just like a stage hypnotist has ways to identify the most impressionable members of the audience for his act; these ?experimenters? know that some people will be easily led, and will take it all in to offer that ?wow, this is incredible? response. What you don?t get, is the reported response of the other type of person who would be guaranteed to dismiss the report as rubbish even if it was staggeringly accurate. On the other hand, astrologers play straight into their hands when they write these kinds of vague psychological profiles where comments can be interpreted in numerous ways. Traditionally natal demonstrations began with a clarification of the data through demonstration of how it described events that had already happened; and it built upon a relationship of confidence and trust between the astrologer and client. I don?t doubt the validity of my own horoscope but I would doubt the ability of some stranger to read it and tell me all about myself, with no input from me on how I am living my life and my past and present circumstances. Joyce Jillson, Hollywood astrologer to the stars, ? prepared a detailed horoscope for a person unknown to her, whose birth information (which is all she requested) was supplied to her by Stossel. So there is some fair criticism here, which points to lessons to be learned for astrologers who think that birth information and a person are one and the same thing. Quote Wed Jul 25, 2007 9:49 am
5 by Andrew I don?t doubt the validity of my own horoscope but I would doubt the ability of some stranger to read it and tell me all about myself, with no input from me on how I am living my life and my past and present circumstances. So there is some fair criticism here, which points to lessons to be learned for astrologers who think that birth information and a person are one and the same thing. Exactly! Well-phrased and judiciously expressed. Quote Wed Jul 25, 2007 11:08 am
6 by ChrisK No surprises here. As Deb said, vaguely worded profiles are sure to fail any testing. But maybe it's good that these skeptics are out there hammering away at simple-minded astrology. Certainly, I'm no fan of their dishonest trickery which was employed back in the 70s during the Gauquelin research. But when it comes to purely psychological readings that are difficult to prove one way or another, a skeptical stance is the right one. Unfortunately, the skeptics criticism of this practice may not have much effect on the true believers who regard astrology more as a faith-based belief (like religion) than an evidence-based belief (like science). In practice I realize these are shorthand labels for different points in the continuum of differential amounts of evidence people require to understand truth claims. Credulous astrologers basically require very little evidence from minimal sources, while skeptics of either debunker or astrological stripe usually require far more in the way of supporting evidence. I still think it is possible to say something falsifiable about someone's life circumstances from a blind reading, but it's important to to be employing the best techniques to accomplish this. This is something that astrology has be reluctant to tackle up to now: which techniques work and which don't? Deb's point about context is a good one -- it is always easier for an astrologer to work with a delimited set of possiblities. In so doing, we should be aware that what we are doing is making our lives easier and making any test of significance more problematic since it would take more hits to be convinced that it was astrology rather than chance that was allowing us to get the prediction right. Predicting the time and exact nature of a future event is probably the hardest thing to do at any time, but particularly when we know nothing about a person's current situation. One problem is that testing has tended to focus on more subjective psychological states which are more difficult to measure. Life outcomes and actual events may better dependent variables. In that case, however, getting substantial amounts of data is more of a problem. www.modernvedicastrology.com Quote Wed Jul 25, 2007 2:57 pm
7 by Tom "enormously bright . . . [with] sexual charisma . . . great charm . . . a sense of moral propriety . . . Sounds like Ted Bundy to me. actually based on the birth information of mass murderer Edmund Kemper III Close Tom Quote Sat Jul 28, 2007 12:44 pm
9 by Tom Thanks for the kind words. What these people are doing is what propagandists, too. They play into the audience's biases. The bias here is that all serial murderers must be snarling, drooling, probably have fangs and think about nothing but killing 24 hours a day. They all must have the same personality and none of their personality characteristics can be acceptable. Hogwash. Ted Bundy was intelligent and charming. So was Al Capone, at times. Gary Ridgeway, a guy who made Bundy look like a boy scout, was mousy and in fact it was his very ordinariness that played a significant role in his remaining free for decades. Charles Manson has the reputation of a monster. Those of us old enough to remember his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine know what I'm talking about. Yet Charlie is mostly incoherent, not too bright, and although he has been said to be charismatic, most sane women I know would have run, not walked away from him. And the fact is he may never have killed anyone himself. So what is the point of this exercise other than to point out that maybe Joyce Jillison isn't such a hot astrologer, and I wouldn't say this exercise even demonstrated that much. I forget when and where I read this, but I do believe it. People love flattery, even when they know it isn't true. So if you give a group of people a so-called astrology reading that says nothing but nice things, the odds are high the individual will believe it. As John Frawley once said, tell the native he is sensitive and even the most hardened thug will recall the time he stroked a puppy. So the skeptics play on this and their own ignorance in order to make their point. You can do the same thing claiming it is the interpretation of an MMPI, and claim that test has no validity. I think this stuff is best ignored. Tom Quote Mon Jul 30, 2007 10:59 pm
10 by nexus7 I am not aure how to respond to this one either. When I first drew up my own chart, I was curious to know what astrologers would make of it, with its horrendous afflictions. Erm..no, I am not an axe murderer, but who knows. In a Minority-Report futuristic world, some psychic might decide that I should be arrested for a murder I will commit in the future and have me put away for my own, and society's, good. The first astrologer I ever met peered intently at my chart, and then at my parents', and made a judgement that was only too true, about certainly aspects (no pun intended) of the nature of the relationship between us. 'They would never have understod you,' she told me. 'They must have thought you were crazy.' Yes, well... There was not a huge sympathy betwen myself and this woman and she made certain basic generalisations that I did not much care for. Perhaps she - and I from a sceptical viewpoint - were lucky from a more sceptic point of view, in that the picture of what to expect was unusually clear. Anyway, there was no question of being seduced by kind words and flattery in this case. Nowadays, I do prefer sceptics or Believers - and do have to say, for me, most astrologers seemed to treat their craft much more like a religious system than a 'rational' science that somehow possessed a validity that the other divinatory systems, being mere fortune-telling devices, did not possess. So, to warn anyone here, or whatever - thatis my posiion now. I am not really a scpetic, but maybe more an anti or a post astrologer. Or even a lapsed astrologer - my sin there as a tender teenager might well have been over-gullibility. Either way, I would rather see astrology as more a science, or as something, like Kepler's astrology, as described by John West, quoing in turn Kepler: 'a witness to he gods.' But not in itself a religion and therefore, not to be something to be imposed on clients, who made hold beieifs that may be different from those held by the astrologer's. John West apprently sent the birth data of Adolf Eichmann to a company that set out computer-generated birthcarts. That too provided a readin full of flattery - but also, quite a few oher interesting and telling comments. Still just anecdotal, but ineresting... Quote Mon Nov 19, 2007 9:22 pm