Do you notice true patterns in the zodiac personality signs?

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My personal opinion is that horoscopes, astrology, and all that goes with it is utter nonsense.
That is just my own opinion, and I respect that many people believe in it.
I wouldn't attempt to change the views of someone that believes in it as what they believe in is up to them. They have a right to believe, just as I have a right not to believe.

Crabtree's Bludgeon, which takes a cynical view that "[n]o set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated."

Uh, no. I'm a Pisces and a Sheep/Goat, and I'm pretty much the opposite of what they say I'm supposed to be...

What leads you to think of yourself as a skeptic?

I don't really get them. And I always assumed if there was an influence, it would come into play whenever personhood is formed. I don't know at what point it is, whether it's in the womb or not and I really don't want to start that debate. If it is in utero, what about preemies and babies born a week or two late?
My physics teacher in school used to have a story about someone using the Universal Gravitational Equation to work out the attraction between his child and the stars compared to the child and the midwife at the time of birth. The attraction was much greater between the baby and the midwife. I thought it was funny at the time.

Carl Sagan addressed that last thing in one of the chapters of his Cosmos series.

He himself had Mars overhead when he was born. But the gravitational pull on him by the obstitrition standing next to him and his mom at the moment of his birth was much greater than the gravitional pull of Mars on him at the time he said.

A planet is more massive than a person, but a person is not only closer - but the inverse square of distance- well -do the math. Your furniture pulls on you more than do the planets.

The fact that respected academics think it's bunk. Also, the fact that I can't figure out for the life of me what kind of mechanism would make it all work.

I think I would want to take some personality tests and a large enough sample of people, then find out the correlation between personality traits and zodiac signs. If you could use the zodiac signs to predict people's personality traits at a rate significantly greater than chance, I would give it some credence--but only to the extent that a correlation exists, and could be caused by people's awareness of their astrological signs and what they are supposed to mean.

I do not think such a correlation exists, however. Knowing your astrological sign would be a rather small impact on personality, which develops long before we know and think about which astrological sign we were born under.

As for the idea that the star sign actually changes the personality directly--there is no proposed, detectable mechanism by which that could happen. All the signals that come to us from planets and stars, including light and gravity, are so extremely overwhelmed by nearby sources of the same forces that it is quite nonsensical to think they would affect a developing fetus's brain.

I do find it very fascinating that we tend to see patterns even when they are not there. Random data looks organized to us because we're always looking for patterns in chaotic data--pictures in the clouds, trends in gambling results. It makes sense that we should; if there is a pattern to distinguish, knowing about it gives us enough of an advantage to offset the cost of seeing patterns where there are none. On the other hand, it makes the early weeks of statistics and probability classes quite counterintuitive.

The true skeptic would be skeptical of the conclusions of the respected academics.

True...and the same can be said about "career pathing" exams.

If you have a preference in what kind of job you'd like to do, you'll answer questions accordingly. For any test to determine which job(s) are a good fit for your likes and dislikes, it has to get the information when you have no preconceived notions on what you'd like to do.

Bull..... I am a virgo, - often thought to be a Leo. Virgo characteristic: Perfectionism. Also a known Aspie trait.
I am a snake. Only "typical" snake characteristic: Intellectualism, - which is found in many intelligent people.
So much for astrology.

Funny that. When I meet someone who really believes in astrology and think their 'star sign' applies to them, they're almost always a Leo. Could it be a similar thing with nearly every country wanting to include the lion as part of their coat of arms/flag/standard? The King of the Jungle of mankind? I suspect that if there were no Leo sign, astrology would have died out years ago.

Astrology only works because of a part of the brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). It seeks out patterns in order to make sense of the world. There have been experiments conducted (see Penn & Teller astrology episode on YT) that have successfully debunked astrology; they found that people will believe whatever you say about them as long as there is a positive element to it, e.g. 'You are patient but can sometimes act rashly.'

I was introduced to astrology as a child and no surprises, it was by a Leo.

apart from the ascription of phenomenal characteristics to the houses of the zodiac, i can not even see how the symbols for the zodiac can be gleaned from the constellations from which they are derived.

for example "taurus" the bull. someone in antiquity who was influential looked at the stars and tried to "join the dots" as it were, and saw a "bull" in the arrangement of a few stars. i can not fathom the leap of artistic license that allowed him to see it:



it is interesting that such a flimsy scaffolding for a figure would become the accepted one. maybe the one who imagined it was an unimaginative ruler or something.
then, after establishing it to be a bull, they ascribe characteristics of bulls to that section of the sky, like stubbornness and materialism. then they probably drew the concept out to equate the stubbornness with trees that are rooted in the ground and then called it "earth" etc etc etc. all based on the flimsy and random pattern that some dullard decreed.

i am going to have to split this post in 2 as i can not post it as one post (forum software "error in posting","could not obtain category list" etc etc).

it all depends on the imagination of the stargazer as to what patterns can be seen in the stars. one may as well have one's own personally designed horoscope.
here is a possible example:

Of course you're gonna find something mentioned on your sign that fits you, just like you will if you look at any of the other signs. Some of it will fit, some won't, independent of sign and zodiac.
The idea that anyone born in one place at one specific time will have the same characteristics is nonsensical. What makes you you is a mix of genetics, environment and to what extent your experiences will turn genes on or off.

Confirmation bias is very real and surely is something to watch for and sometimes very hard to see or catch as it kind of fsctors itself into the assessment, but after almost fifty years of observing compatibilities meaning not just what they say about this or that characteristic of this or thatsign or year, but energetically how it feels, yes, there is something to it.

I, too, have wondered for many years how the the Chinese system works..it has to be based on some physical principle. The only thing I have come up with is peaking solar flares, but that is only every eleven, not twelve years. I think it is something along this line, though, and somehow reading this thread has stimulated my thinking process, but no time to share my thoughts right now.

The message by this one person, the A person, about science, or I should say, his story about ancient people and then---ta dah-- science, has really stimulated my thinking. Sometimes you need contrasting view in order to better be able to express your own.