General Question

Knotmyday's avatar

Which stars are they looking at?

Asked by Knotmyday (7516points) January 16th, 2009

I was browsing internet horoscope sites…and the message for my sign (Aries) for today (January 16, 2009) is different on every site without exception.
examples:

http://www.astrologycom.com/ariesdaily.php

http://www.astrology-online.com/daily.htm

http://www.dailyhoroscopes.com/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&Itemid=4&agid=27084&year=2009&month=01&day=16

http://horoscopes.astrology.com/dailylongaries.html?ice=ast,scopes,mnext

and this one just scares the shit out of me:

http://www.dailyscopes.com/daily/aries.php

Where are they getting this stuff? Random fortune generators? Fooey.

Observing members: 0 Composing members: 0

1 Answer

dynamicduo's avatar

This is pretty usual. All signs for all days are different for all sites. Yes, they’re pretty much randomly generated and randomly assigned, because there is no incentive for them to provide accurate horoscopes as there is no penalty for providing a non accurate one.

The well known magician and skeptic James Randi did a test to demonstrate flaws in the perception of astrology which you can watch on Youtube. He gave each student in a classroom the exact same horoscope and, without the students knowing they were the same, asked them to rate on a scale of 1–5 how accurate they believed it reflected themselves personally. Mostly everyone answered 4 or 5.

Astrology itself has been debunked by science, including a very interesting study done involving 2000 people born around the same time. They concluded: “The scientists failed to find any evidence of similarities between the “time twins”, however. They reported in the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies: “The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success . . . but the results are uniformly negative.”

All of this adds up to one big conclusion: all the horoscopes are different because they’re all made up. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some random characteristic generator that feeds an author a seed, such as “charismatic”, and the author creates a horoscope based on that: “Your charisma will come in handy to land a big deal.” and assigns it to a sign randomly.

Answer this question

Login

or

Join

to answer.

This question is in the General Section. Responses must be helpful and on-topic.

Your answer will be saved while you login or join.

Have a question? Ask Fluther!

What do you know more about?
or
Knowledge Networking @ Fluther