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AR 29:35 - Does astrology really work? Test results are in!
In this issue:
ASTROLOGY - rigorously testing whether astrological signs "can predict any of 37 facts about a person's life"
CULTURE - What will it be: meaningful belonging, or "an ever more desperate and blinkered tribalism" accompanied by a "loneliness crisis"?
ISLAM - remnants of Malaysia's banned Al-Arqam sect still sowing harm
Apologia Report 29:35 (1,676)
September 18, 2024
ASTROLOGY
Has it really taken this long for a serious study evaluating professional astrologer's claims to finally occur? Well, at least now perhaps, we can say the wait is over. "Does Astrology Work? We put 152 astrologers to the test" by Spencer Greenberg, André Ferretti, and Travis M. Anon (ClearerThinking, Aug 7 '24), begins by explaining that "we ran a study testing whether astrological sun signs (like Scorpio and Capricorn) can predict any of 37 facts about a person's life, such as their educational level, and number of close friends. We found that whereas some personality tests had a reasonable ability to predict many of these facts, zodiac signs couldn't predict a single one of them."
Then came the criticism, which amounted to "real astrologers use much more complex systems involving a person's entire astrological chart."
This in turn, prompted a more serious study in which "we enlisted six astrologers to help us design a new study to test astrology itself, as practiced by astrologers, rather than the silly, tabloid version of it. And to make the challenge more interesting, we offered a $1000 prize to the first astrologer who could perform sufficiently well on our test.
"There are many different types of astrology, so this study sought to test a claim fundamental to nearly all of them, which is: a person's natal chart (reflecting the positions of celestial bodies at the time of their birth) offers insights about that person's character or life.
"The test, which remains publicly available so that anyone can use it to test their own astrology skills, consists of 12 multiple choice questions. For each question, participants are shown a great deal of information about one real person's life, reflecting a real person's answers to 43 different questions. These questions were chosen by asking astrologers what they would ask someone if they wanted to be able to accurately guess that person's astrological chart. ...
"Alongside this information about each real person, astrologers were shown 5 astrological charts. Only one of these was the real natal chart of that person (based on their birth date, time, and location), and the other four were 'decoy' charts that were generated based on random dates, times, and locations. The astrologer's task was to determine which one of these five charts is the real one. ...
"To help increase participation, we offered a $1,000 prize to the first astrologer (if any) who could get at least 11 right during the study period. Just before starting the challenge, 25% of those with astrological experience believed they would win this prize, and right after finishing the challenge 15% believed that they had done well enough to win this prize. ...
"Despite their high-degree of confidence in their performance, astrologers as a group performed no better than chance - that is, their distribution of results closely resembled what you'd see if they had all been guessing at random. ...
"Not a single astrologer got more than 5 out of 12 answers correct - even though, after completing the task, more than half of astrologers believed they had gotten more than 5 answers correct.
"More experience with astrology had no statistically significant association with better performance, and the astrologers with the most experience didn't do any better than the rest. ...
"Quite surprising to us, there was very little agreement among astrologers about which natal chart belonged to each study subject. The astrologers who reported the greatest expertise had the highest level of agreement, but they still only agreed with each other only 28% of the time....
"This suggests there is little consensus among astrologers when interpreting the same charts, even among those with high levels of experience. ...
"Finally, astrologers had little agreement with each other about what the correct chart was for each question. All of this provides evidence that astrology simply doesn't work." The author's conclusion: "we believe that this study provides significant reason to doubt the claims of astrologers." Indeed. <www.tinyurl.com/5d2j82bn>
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CULTURE
According to the Jul 6 '21 issue of National Review, the May 2021 American Perspectives Survey <www.tinyurl.com/3a3kfu94> conducted by the Survey Center on American Life found that "the social landscape is far less favorable than it once was. Over the past three decades, the number of close friends Americans have has plummeted.
"This friendship recession is particularly bad for men. The percentage of men with at least six close friends fell by half since 1990, from 55 percent to 27 percent. The study also found the percentage of men without any close friends jumped from 3 percent to 15 percent, a fivefold increase.
"Single men fare the worst. One in five American men who are unmarried and not in a romantic relationship report not having any close friends." <www.tinyurl.com/3wcv5fsw>
Three years later, things are not looking up. In the Jul 24 '24 feature for Commonweal, "What's Behind America's Loneliness Crisis?" by Ian Marcus Corbin (faculty in neurology and bioethics, Harvard Medical School; Senior Fellow, Capita), we learn that "Loneliness-production has been a big business for a very long time." Despair fueled by control brings it on. How sick is our world? Here, Corbin has taken its temperature to find out.
"Management science was founded in the early twentieth century by the theorist Frederick W. Taylor with the specific goal of eliminating as much know-how, judgment, and decision-making power as possible from the jobs of factory workers....
"The tight concentration of creative control in the hands of a few anointed managers has gradually spread to white-collar work...." And today, here comes "AI-powered surveillance of office workers. Depending on your point of view, the rise of artificial intelligence either threatens or promises to pound a few final nails into the coffin of human agency. There are few tasks in the work-world we are making that can be turned toward any truly human purpose, and so fewer and fewer workers will have the experience of working alongside true comrades - people one might be willing to make sacrifices for. In this system, we are all mercenaries scrambling to grab some scrap of security for ourselves and those we love."
(Can you think of anything that better fits the definition of "bleak" than this? Actually, bleak doesn't come close. Perhaps "hellish" is more appropriate? - RP)
"Many Americans increasingly feel dwarfed or even impotent in their interactions with massive, faceless forces and institutions. All power, whether it be governmental, commercial, financial, or technological, seems to rest in the hands of a few insider-trading, Epstein Island - visiting, geriatric elites who barely need to pretend that they're working for the common good. They hide behind sanitized PR and telephone menus designed to frustrate your attempt to speak with a person."
(It's not hard to see how this too could fuel a similarly bleak realization - leaving a Christless world nursing a queer feeling over the growing dread of uncertainty and an approaching dark future. - RP)
"For many Americans, home ownership - the main engine of wealth accumulation - seems forever out of reach, as real estate is snapped up by private equity and baby-boomer homeowners cling to houses far too large for them and block the construction of new housing in their communities. ... Employee-renters have no such stake or security. [B]ecause we're all one email - from HR or perhaps from the property-management company - away from social death. ...
"As bosses and landlords scoop up ever-larger tracts of the American landscape, promising that the rest of us will own nothing, but be happy, they threaten the continuation of the thing we call America. The problem has been steadily growing for decades, but at least now the symptoms - loneliness, anxiety, alienation, and bitter partisanship - are being recognized, even if we don't all agree on their cause. ...
"Hannah Arendt famously argued that loneliness is the sine qua non precondition of totalitarianism. This is what she meant. The lack of shared agency is a desperate condition for our kind of animal. The lonely will scramble for community, even if it requires believing or doing terrible things."
Corbin concludes: "The least lonely among us belong to families, religious congregations, professions, artistic scenes, or political movements that set before us tasks that advance a deep and shared purpose. The future lies there - either in generative, hopeful, creative communities or in an ever more desperate and blinkered tribalism." <www.tinyurl.com/ye2y6rmf>
POSTSCRIPT, Nov 7 '24: Also consider: <https://www.equip.org/articles/the-antidote-to-fomo-and-fobo/>
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ISLAM
The following local headline first caught our eye: "Malaysia Rescues over 400 Children from Sexual Slavery in Islamic Charity Homes." <www.tinyurl.com/fymwykjr> It is worded better than that of its source: U.S. News & World Report, Sep 12 '24, by Danial Azhar (Reuters) -- "Police conducted coordinated raids on 20 premises run by Global Ikhwan Services and Business (GISB) across two Malaysian states on Wednesday, arresting 171 adults, including 'ustazs' or Islamic religious teachers. Those rescued included 201 boys and 201 girls, aged between one and 17. ...
"Two of the premises raided were registered with the state government as Islamic schools, the Selangor Islamic religious department said in a statement on Thursday. ...
"GISB, which has been linked to a banned religious sect in Malaysia, is involved in businesses ranging from supermarkets to laundromats and operates in multiple countries including Indonesia, Singapore, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, France, Australia and Thailand, according to its website.
"The group has acknowledged its links to the now-defunct Malaysia-based Al-Arqam religious sect, which was banned by the government in 1994, but now describes itself as an Islamic conglomerate based on Muslim practices." <www.tinyurl.com/4aav6cpy>
An analysis on the Eurasia Review site (Sep 14 '24) elaborates: "Al-Arqam was founded in 1968 by Ashaari Muhammad as a spiritual movement focusing on self-sufficiency, discipline, and an Islamic utopia. By the 1980s, it had gained tens of thousands of followers not only in Malaysia but in neighboring Indonesia, Thailand, and Brunei. … Ashaari - known among his followers as 'Abuya' or 'father' - had four wives and reportedly as many as 40 children, before he died of a lung infection in 2010. ... Ashaari's teachings were considered wrong because they contradicted fundamental Islamic principles'; said Shukri Ahmad, dean of the School of Language, Civilization and Philosophy at University Utara Malaysia. For example, claiming to communicate with the Prophet [Muhammad] is a common trait among deviant movements. When a leader is seen as infallible, and everything they do is considered correct, something is clearly wrong." <www.tinyurl.com/32e9be6j>
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