Blog Post 2

 Pseudoscience: Astrology

        While reading the first lecture on comparing the types of thinking, the section on pseudoscience intrigued me. Mainly because pseudoscience is more discreetly woven into mainstream media than expected. Hence the topic of this post: Astrology. According to The National Library of Medicine, "At least 40% of Americans, for example, believe in extra-sensory perception and 25% believe that the position of the stars affects life on Earth". So at least a quarter of the American population believes that astrology actively affects their day to day life. For context, America has a population of 333.3 million people, so a lot of people practice this pseudoscience. You often hear of people asking each other what their sign is, or their behavior makes sense because of their astrological sign. People often go to psychics and tarot readers to get their astrology reading, or purchasing a subscription from an astrology cite for the same service. So this is a fairly profitable pseudoscience for anyone who believes in it.

    Now what is Astrology? Astrology is the divination of the supposed influences of the stars and planets on human affairs and terrestrial events by their positions and aspects. Having a bad week? That's because the moon's in retrograde. Went on a bad date? That's because he was a scorpio. These are common scenarios in which people use astrology to try and make sense of the events in their lives. People have also been known to use astrology to predict the kind of day they're going to have or what they should expect to happen, this is also called a horoscope . These horoscopes claim to be "comprehensive, accurate, and intelligent", when in fact they're quite the opposite. Another clear indicator of pseudoscience is the use of imprecise, scientific-sounding language. So the claim of accuracy amid other such things is incorrect. And the astrology readings given to people are usually rather vague, that way if the reading isn't completely accurate to what happened in someone's life there's a loop hole. Therefore allowing this practice to not be disproved, but then on the slight chance the reading is correct, this is the evidence used to support the practice. So astrology tends to be very misleading in regards to what people expect.