No, because that piece immediately makes the bogus assumption(s) that Zander was pointing out in the first place, i.e. that the mechanism *behind* the (alleged) efficacy of astrology is (a) something to do with the stars & planets themselves (rather than, as Zander posits, simply being accidentally correlated with the positions of the stars in a way that makes them a convenient set of reference points), and (b) due to one of the 4 fundamental forces we already know about (c) operating in a way that's intuitively obvious, at least to the extent that the size of effect will be in proportion to the size of the force applied. Those of us who know a thing or two about software know that selectively applied one-bit changes can have dramatic effects where deleting a whole file has very little; Similar things are known to happen in the field of genetics, and may also apply in epigenetics - which is my bet for where we're most likely to find "time of the year" influences on adult personality, aptitudes, health etc. (I would also expect those effects to be somewhat scrambled by modern living with respect to the past, when we had fewer ways to cheat the cycles of hot/cold, light/dark, long-day/short-day, summer food/winter food, etc.)
It's also very snarky in tone, which of course just makes it needlessly uncomfortable to read for anyone who doesn't already agree with its conclusions. Basically, it's not so much preaching to the converted as preaching to the uncoverted in a style that's designed primarily to make the converted chuckle, rather than actually shed any light on the issue. It's also thereby exactly the kind of thing that - back in my younger, more astrology-agnostic days - would have made me want to side with the astrologers just 'cos they appeared to be nicer people, interested in actually helping ignorant people like me understand things rather than making us feel small.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2011-01-17 07:29 pm (UTC)It's also very snarky in tone, which of course just makes it needlessly uncomfortable to read for anyone who doesn't already agree with its conclusions. Basically, it's not so much preaching to the converted as preaching to the uncoverted in a style that's designed primarily to make the converted chuckle, rather than actually shed any light on the issue. It's also thereby exactly the kind of thing that - back in my younger, more astrology-agnostic days - would have made me want to side with the astrologers just 'cos they appeared to be nicer people, interested in actually helping ignorant people like me understand things rather than making us feel small.