How many of you read daily horoscope?

*I don't wish to offend anybody and hope the discussion doesn't get heated.
But I thought since this is an engineering site people would be more science inclined. I guess majority of engineers don't believe in the astrology, I hope this isn't a happy delusion of mine*
**feel free to vote on the poll.It is intended to amuse,elevate and instruct so don't be offended by it's light tenor. I forgot to include "none of the above" so sorry to those who felt left out**

Every sunday when I open Times Of India I see a precious page wasted by the likes of Bejan Daruwala - Times of India.Every day in the morning when I flip channels I notice people being given false assurances based on highly deterministic phenomenon such as planetary movements. Once in a while I also see respected TV actors trying to rob innocent people by selling amulets and charms. All this makes me wonder how come educated people be so unaware of the scientific origins of these myths. Note I am not attacking any religion as astrology doesn't form a part of core belief of any religious system AFAIK.


I think our society(eastern as well as western) can call itself enlightened only when stuff like daily horoscope becomes part of newspaper archives and the paper saved in the process is utilised in the spread of education,health awareness,economic advise,career advise etc.


I give a lot of credit to our ancient ancestors for precisely working out motions of various planets and in being able to predict eclipses.This was the cradle of astronomy/cosmology . But then the ancients went awry by attributing human significance to these events.


One of the basic tenets of the scientific method is the principle of induction. I.e if phenomenon A occurs with phenomenon B a sufficient number of times, we can expect phenomenon A to occur along with phenomenon B in the future as well. Science get updated as soon as new data is added. In many cases what happens is we notice an instance of phenomenon A not occuring with phenomenon B and our confidence in our theory starts to crumble.Thus the science of yesterday has a large probability of being just a mathematical model which doesn't agree with observations today.


Sadly this has not happened with the ancient science of astrology amongst the common people of today. It is highly likely that in the past during certain eclipses a man may have lost his tooth by accident.And this may have repeated 3-4 times. But saying that an eclipse causes a man to lose his teeth is not compatible with modern science.(I have used eclipse example as an illustration,I personally haven't heard of such an astrological principle, but I won't be surprised if there is one) Similar logic applies to other superstitions of today such as "cat crossing your path is a bad omen".




Our ancients weren't fools they were simply following the respectable principle of induction which is what drives science and almost all of our common sense. But we are being fools today by not taking into consideration new data and still giving astrology the respect of science.


I simply find it hard to believe that human beings can be divided into 12 groups simply on the basis of the time of their birth. We are way too complex creatures whose actions are undeterministic as far as today's science is concerned. I find it an insult on the entire human race that our lives are based on something as simple and deterministic as Kepler's laws.We should have the courage to face the consequences of our own actions and be prepared for some random events in our life - which are bound to happen as we can't predict future completely( both classically and quantum mechanically as our observations are always incomplete).




I would again emphasise that I find it hard that people on this site believe in astrology. But I would like to find out.