HACKER Q&A
📣 jelliclesfarm

Astrology? Yay, Nay or Meh?


For a ‘pseudo science’, astrology and horoscope chart making is heavily dependent on the gifts of CS.

What would a marriage of AI and Astrology come up with..?

Example:

1. astronomy says Jupiter, Saturn and mercury will be in the constellation of Sagittarius on Christmas Day.

2. Vedic astrology marks dec 25th as a day when a cluster forms in the house of Sagittarius with 6 celestial bodies(three planets, sun, moon and Ketu, the imaginary south node of moon).

I don’t know astrology and so I don’t know what it means. And let’s assume that it is significant for some world event.

A rational non believer would say that any events on that day is common place and a coincidence.

But can AI map ‘coincidences’ to come up with a pattern? If it does, would it be able to transform a pseudo science into a valid science.

In other words, what’s the difference between pattern recognition and prediction by AI vs pattern recognition and prediction by old world knowledge?


  👤 rraghur Accepted Answer ✓
Since you asked :) - Nay!! (what's meh?)

and you said it - it's a pseudo science... so why, even?

If you hadn't said 'pseudo science', I'd have assumed you're a believer and that the question was in earnest.

OTOH - you do end with 'old world knowledge' so I'm not sure anymore.

but you're not asking that...I suppose what you're asking is akin to training an AI on two unrelated datasets and asking it to predict one based on other... sure - it's going to spit out some 'pattern recognition' where none exists. Basically, AI (or anything else) can't manufacture causality.


👤 mindcrime
Sure, you can parse over huge amounts of data and find all sorts of bogus "patterns" that don't actually mean anything[1][2]. But you can't make a valid science with real predictive power out of something where there is no actual causal connection between event A and event B.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_correlation

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking


👤 masonic
Note that the traditional date/sign assignments don't even resemble the current calendar relationships. Most people were born with the sun a full sign off from what pop culture horoscopes say. Plus, for a bunch of those who think they are Scorpio, the sun was actually in Ophiuchus on their birthday.