A while back, there was an HN Discussion of an article titled The code worked differently when the moon was full. The article itself is not really about the full moon impacting the code but some of the early comments talked about real world examples of that type thing, such as:
Somewhere along the way, astrology seems to have left behind such practical observations that were apparently primitive efforts at weather prediction and turned into fortune telling of the sort found at carnivals.
The plot for the movie Only You hinges on a woman taking fortune telling rather seriously. Faith Corvatch flies to Venice on short notice in search of a man named Damon Bradley just ten days before her wedding.
She has spent years believing this is the name of her soul mate. The punchline at the end of the movie is that her brother supplied that name on two separate occasions as a joke, once while playing a Ouija board with her and a few years later he slipped a carnival fortune teller a few bucks.
Her brother successfully conned her. She foolishly fell for it.
There is a lot of evidence that most fortune tellers ask leading questions and tell people what they want to hear. In fortune telling, as in many things, money seems to be the root of a lot of problems.
If you want to support yourself as a fortune teller, you need to somehow make people happy. You need to somehow convince them that paying you is worth the money.
Often, it is marketed as entertainment but not always. The roots of making a living at astrology seem to go back to when astrologers were advisors to kings and queens.
Astrology involves a lot of math, among other things. So these were likely learned people giving fairly reasonable advice rooted in personal wisdom and marketing it to powerful people on the idea that the wisdom came from some mystical source.
Chalking it up to "the stars aligning" was likely a means to have powerful people accept such feedback. Kings and queens likely did not want to feel like puppets to ordinary people who happened to have accumulated a lot of knowledge but would accept "The stars say so."
In my early teens, I studied astrology in earnest. In my twenties, I considered trying to make a living at it because I knew a lot about it and there seem to be no particular schools for astrology or organizations granting astrology licenses, etc.
It seems like something you can just learn on your own and put out a shingle and call yourself a professional astrologer and begin charging money. So that seemed like a potential opportunity for me in a life that was throwing up obstacles to having a serious career and establishing an adequate earned income of my own.
But I ultimately decided that the advice from an astrologer is only as wise as the person giving it. I was casting charts for personal acquaintances but the advice I was giving was rooted in having done a great deal of therapy.
So I concluded that studying astrology is not what provides that wisdom. If you have good advice to give, that comes from something else in your life.
An astrological chart is a tool, sort of like a Meyers-Briggs Personality Type Test or an IQ test. Psychological exams and IQ tests are somewhat useful tools in the hands of a trained professional but are sort of like party tricks when they pop up on the internet. Astrology seems to follow a similar pattern.
Ultimately, I decided if I was going to be paid for giving advice to people, I wanted to be paid based on professional credentials and have people understand that while I have education and training, it is, in fact, just my opinion and not some kind of edict from the gods. Professional opinions carry more weight than personal opinions but they still get labeled as opinions and I felt that distinction mattered.
I felt like becoming a professional astrologer would be a dangerous path for me personally. It would have been all too easy to drink my own koolaid and begin believing that I was channeling some greater wisdom from on high and feel some desperate need to convince people to listen to me.
I decided that if I really had something "greater" to offer the world, I would rather be the Einstein of my era than some kind of mystic.
Among other experiences, I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. It has taken a lot of years to wash off the expectation that people should listen to me and take me seriously merely because it is me saying it.
Over the course of many years, I have pursued a policy of trying to figure out how to make my arguments stand on their own, having nothing to do with who said it. My ability to do that was enhanced by spending nearly six years homeless, a time during which it was mostly a liability, not an asset, that is was me saying it.
I guess you can file that under "Be careful what you wish for."
- Low tide impacting a thing.
- A biannual issue caused by the angle of the sun that one remark dubbed bughenge.
- And the observation: it's not astrology to suggest that the phase of the Moon could affect things on Earth seeing as how it's what causes tides.
Somewhere along the way, astrology seems to have left behind such practical observations that were apparently primitive efforts at weather prediction and turned into fortune telling of the sort found at carnivals.
The plot for the movie Only You hinges on a woman taking fortune telling rather seriously. Faith Corvatch flies to Venice on short notice in search of a man named Damon Bradley just ten days before her wedding.
She has spent years believing this is the name of her soul mate. The punchline at the end of the movie is that her brother supplied that name on two separate occasions as a joke, once while playing a Ouija board with her and a few years later he slipped a carnival fortune teller a few bucks.
Her brother successfully conned her. She foolishly fell for it.
There is a lot of evidence that most fortune tellers ask leading questions and tell people what they want to hear. In fortune telling, as in many things, money seems to be the root of a lot of problems.
If you want to support yourself as a fortune teller, you need to somehow make people happy. You need to somehow convince them that paying you is worth the money.
Often, it is marketed as entertainment but not always. The roots of making a living at astrology seem to go back to when astrologers were advisors to kings and queens.
Astrology involves a lot of math, among other things. So these were likely learned people giving fairly reasonable advice rooted in personal wisdom and marketing it to powerful people on the idea that the wisdom came from some mystical source.
Chalking it up to "the stars aligning" was likely a means to have powerful people accept such feedback. Kings and queens likely did not want to feel like puppets to ordinary people who happened to have accumulated a lot of knowledge but would accept "The stars say so."
In my early teens, I studied astrology in earnest. In my twenties, I considered trying to make a living at it because I knew a lot about it and there seem to be no particular schools for astrology or organizations granting astrology licenses, etc.
It seems like something you can just learn on your own and put out a shingle and call yourself a professional astrologer and begin charging money. So that seemed like a potential opportunity for me in a life that was throwing up obstacles to having a serious career and establishing an adequate earned income of my own.
But I ultimately decided that the advice from an astrologer is only as wise as the person giving it. I was casting charts for personal acquaintances but the advice I was giving was rooted in having done a great deal of therapy.
So I concluded that studying astrology is not what provides that wisdom. If you have good advice to give, that comes from something else in your life.
An astrological chart is a tool, sort of like a Meyers-Briggs Personality Type Test or an IQ test. Psychological exams and IQ tests are somewhat useful tools in the hands of a trained professional but are sort of like party tricks when they pop up on the internet. Astrology seems to follow a similar pattern.
Ultimately, I decided if I was going to be paid for giving advice to people, I wanted to be paid based on professional credentials and have people understand that while I have education and training, it is, in fact, just my opinion and not some kind of edict from the gods. Professional opinions carry more weight than personal opinions but they still get labeled as opinions and I felt that distinction mattered.
I felt like becoming a professional astrologer would be a dangerous path for me personally. It would have been all too easy to drink my own koolaid and begin believing that I was channeling some greater wisdom from on high and feel some desperate need to convince people to listen to me.
I decided that if I really had something "greater" to offer the world, I would rather be the Einstein of my era than some kind of mystic.
Among other experiences, I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. It has taken a lot of years to wash off the expectation that people should listen to me and take me seriously merely because it is me saying it.
Over the course of many years, I have pursued a policy of trying to figure out how to make my arguments stand on their own, having nothing to do with who said it. My ability to do that was enhanced by spending nearly six years homeless, a time during which it was mostly a liability, not an asset, that is was me saying it.
I guess you can file that under "Be careful what you wish for."