What Astrology Gets Right
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So let's dive right in.

Alrighty, chat. Today, we're going to talk about why women believe in astrology. So I see this question get asked all the time, right? So, and people will come up with all sorts of answers. So there's like the top answer on Quora. And the first thing that I noticed about these answers is that they're usually dudes. And

Usually, like, the answers—the instant someone says they believe in astrology, I can't take them seriously anymore. They're both forms of looking for control and meaning in life when it becomes clear that there's a lot that we can't control and that doesn't mean anything. So the most common things that I tend to see are, first of all, people will ask this question, why do women believe in astrology? And then the most common answer is—

It's a way of like making certainty out of uncertainty, which is like fair enough. I think it's a valid opinion. But I have a different take on why women believe in astrology. And that's really simple. It's because it works. It's like, oh, Dr. K, I expected better of you. Like you're espousing such pseudoscientific concepts. I can't believe that you're saying that astrology is working. Like, oh, my God. Like, how could you say that? That's insane. So here's what I'd like to do.

I'd like to talk to you all for a second about anti-vaxxers. When you talk to an anti-vaxxer, do they know how vaccines work? Like, do they understand the methodology behind

or system behind which vaccines produce their efficacy? Generally speaking, the answer is no. Second thing is when you ask an anti-vaxxer, like, you know, like, why do you believe what you believe? They'll say like, oh, like vaccines or I've done my research, right? This is a big thing that they'll say. I've done my research. Like I know. And what the research turns out to be is like reading stuff on the internet. So if you're someone who's like, oh my God, Dr. K, what do you mean astrology works? This is insane. It's pseudoscience. There's no science behind it.

So my first question to you is, do you understand the system of astrology? Like, have you studied astrology? Do you understand the theory behind it? Do you understand supposedly how it works? Have you read any science behind it? Have you actually done any research? Have you either conducted trials yourself or read peer-reviewed publications around astrology?

And even if you've read peer-reviewed publications, do you understand the methodology of astrology well enough to apply a critical lens to a scientific study on astrology so that you know, oh, this is a high-quality study on astrology, this is a low-quality study on astrology?

So if you haven't done those things, then I'm going to sort of put you in the same credibility camp as an anti-vaxxer, which I know is a strong and bold statement to make. My point is that if we're going to be truly open-minded and skeptical about things, we should be open-minded, critical, and skeptical of our own beliefs, where they come from, and whether the belief is born of a general, common-sense view, or is actually the result of a critical and scientific thought process that then follows...

And that ends up with a conclusion. Today's video is going to be about astrology. We're going to talk about the science of astrology. We're going to talk about astrology from a lot of different perspectives. First thing to understand is that astrology is not homogenous. That's kind of like saying, okay, like, do you believe in science?

So like science can say all kinds of things. Not all science is even scientific. Over 50% of studies, scientific studies that are done are not reproducible. There are mistakes that make in science. Science has made all kinds of conclusions. So a great example of this is we discovered this great medication for nausea that we gave to people with cancer called thalidomide. And man, did thalidomide work great.

So we were like, oh, my God, thalidomide is awesome. It was FDA approved, fantastic medication. And then, you know, we made the mistake as doctors of giving it to another group of people who is very nauseous, which are pregnant women. And then their babies started getting born without arms or legs. So then we stopped using thalidomide.

So science makes a lot of mistakes, does a lot of things really well. So there are all kinds of different methodologies, and I don't think all astrology is the same. So if there's no quality control, like how do you know whether the astrologer that you're talking to is a good astrologer or a bad astrologer? Now you may say, but Dr. K, there's no such thing as a good astrology because it's all BS.

So that is like an a priori conclusion, right? You'll get that. So like, let's not do that. If there's no quality control for the field, what would that do to the credibility of the field as a whole?

Generally speaking, it's going to tank it. And that used to happen in medicine, by the way. So if you go back, you know, like 100 or 200 years, like people wanted to avoid doctors like the plague because there was no quality control of the practice of medicine. They were like bleeding people and making, you know, giving people like cocaine and opiates and all this kind of stuff all the time. So when there's no like system of regulation, it's going to make sense that astrology as a whole as a field may not be very credible.

The second thing is that we're going to tunnel down to what is BS and what isn't. So if y'all are people who love astrology and you're like, oh my God, Dr. K is going to be like pro-astrology, you may be in for a little bit of a shock because what we're going to talk about today is highly technical. If y'all want to dive deep into the most important topics for our community, check out HG Memberships. The first thing to understand is that there needs to be no outcome from small talk.

This is a vasana too. Your mind is vasanas all the way down. So the key thing about detachment is not that you don't have wants. It is that your wants do not control you. Membership grants you access to monthly streams as well as a back catalog of a year's worth of content.

in addition to quests and so much more. If you're interested, you can sign up for $10 a month at healthygamer.gg slash memberships or click the link in the description below. Hope to see you there. So today I'm going to use the full suite of my training at Harvard Medical School when I was at this place called the OSHA Research Center, studying evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine. So when I was a research assistant there, learned so much about the way that science is done.

So when we're trying to study things like meditation, one of the biggest problems with studying meditation is that many of the people who will design trials—actually, this is less true of meditation, but if we look at alternative medicine, acupuncture is a great example. A big problem with the trials on acupuncture is that they are designed by people who do not understand acupuncture. So if you design a trial to study something, but you do not understand what you are studying—

the trial can essentially have a false negative. So I'll give you just a simple example. So one of the studies on acupuncture that I was reviewing many years ago used something called a collapsible needle. So acupuncture is when you poke someone on these meridians, like with a needle, right? So someone was like, okay, I know I'm going to study, I'm going to evaluate acupuncture by comparing the needle insertion to something called a collapsible needle, which is when I

poke them instead of the needle piercing the skin, it's going to collapse up. It's like a fake sword, basically. So it never pierces the skin. It just collapses into the top half of the needle thing, if that kind of makes sense. And so they sort of found that, okay, when I use collapsible needles versus real needles, the effects are roughly the same. So they said, therefore, acupuncture doesn't work.

Well, when I talked to people who are acupuncturists and also researchers at this place called the Harvard Medical School, they were like, yeah, this is not a great study. And I asked, why is that? And they said, well, there's this thing called acupressure. They're still exerting some kind of force, right?

on these meridians. So when you exert some kind of force on these meridians, the needle doesn't need to penetrate the skin. It's the activation of those points on the meridians, which potentially a collapsible needle can do anyway. You're still using all the right points. A better way to study acupuncture would be to use—you can poke people—

but poke people along meridians and then poke people in random places. This is a better way to design a study that tests the veracity of acupuncture, because then what we're actually doing is the physical intervention is the same. We're getting insertion of the skin. What we're really testing then is if you poke people with needles along a meridian or along life energy or whatever versus along random places, does it create differential effects? This would be a better way to study acupuncture.

So my point here is that anytime you want to study something, if you have poor understanding of what you are studying, the value of the trial that you design, the design of the trial is going to be so messed up that irrespective of what your trial finds, the findings are kind of questionable because the design is poor. Now, the opposite is also true, where if y'all are familiar with research, you may know this.

where if you understand what you are studying really, really, really well, you can design a really shady trial to artificially create

a verified scientific understanding. So a great example of this is studies on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I'm a psychiatrist. I prescribe these things. These are things like Prozac, fluoxetine, citalopram, escitalopram, right? So what we basically now know through lots of meta-analyses is that there were a lot of early trials done on SSRIs, which found a really, really strong effect.

But then after we do 40 years of post-market research and we do things called meta-analyses, what we tend to discover is that a lot of the therapeutic value of SSRIs is actually placebo effect. Some studies show that up to 70% of the value of SSRIs is non-pharmacologic. It is something like a placebo.

So my point is that it is possible for us to design a set of trials which show an amazing effect and then also after time do retrospective analysis on outcomes and discover that the effect is not nearly as big as we thought. So when we're looking at scientific studies...

Just because a scientific study shows something doesn't mean that it's true. And just because a scientific study shows that something is false doesn't mean that the scientific study is correct, right? So a scientific study can disprove the null hypothesis and be wrong, and a scientific study can show that this is ineffective, and that study can be wrong too. The key thing that I want you all to really think about, okay? So first, and now we're coming back to astrology. How many...

Scientists, do you know who are experts in astrology that are designing trials on astrology? And how many astrologers do you know that are expert researchers and capable of doing

designing really robust research studies to demonstrate the efficacy of astrology. In my experience, these are two different groups of people. I've met astrologers who are really good, and I've met scientists who are really good. I can't think of a single time where I've met someone who is good at both. So if these two disciplines are not even overlapping, how would you ever expect to see a high-quality study on astrology?

But that's what we're going to look at today. Let's start with some of the basics around why astrology works. So the first thing that I think is like very, very reasonable and I think has good support, we'll show you all papers in a second, is that astrology is a really good projective tool. Now, what does this mean? So y'all may have heard of something called an inkblot test. So an inkblot test is something that is used by psychologists and psychiatrists to

to bring things that are in the patient's subconscious mind to the surface. Basically, what we'll do is we'll splatter ink and then we'll fold something in half and it's basically a mirror image, okay? Now, there's no intrinsic value to the inkblot. The inkblot doesn't mean anything, right? There's nothing, actually, there's no hidden message in it. But when we take a human mind and we show it some neutral thing, what is dormant in the mind comes out, right?

OK, so I'm going to show you all like an example of of like a projective image here. OK, so when you look at this image, what do you see? Right. So like this is where like the image is purposely vague. So like some people may say, like, when I look at this, I look at I see someone who's overdosed over here and a woman who has just found that their husband has overdosed.

But the point is that like what I see in this image doesn't have a lot to do with the image. It has a lot to do with what's in my mind. So when I look at this image, what do I see? This looks creepy AF, right? So is this someone who's harnessing a kidney or is this someone who's like performing a surgery? So like what is this? Like what do y'all see when I show you this? Is this a grandfather who is like maybe patting their son's forehead? Yeah.

Or a grandson's forehead? Or is this like an old man who is stealing a child's soul? My point is that these are what projective tests are. So there's no intrinsic value to the image, right? There's nothing in the image that says one thing or another. But there is absolutely a validated scientific way

to take something that has no intrinsic value and use it as a tool to help human beings understand themselves, their fears, their conflicts, what they should be worried about, right? So like you know in life that you should be worried about particular things. You know you have particular weak points, particular vulnerabilities, right?

How do we take all those subconscious thoughts and bring them to the surface? So at a minimum, I think astrology can be scientifically useful, even psychologically useful, as something like a projective test. In this way, I think Myers-Briggs is another really good example of this.

some people have said that Ayurveda falls into this category, which I think I agree with. Like, so I think Ayurveda has a very projective component to it that can be absolutely useful. So this is where we have to be a little bit detailed, okay? A little bit precise. So the first thing is that astrology could have very real world value, could even have a scientifically validated level of value, right? Because projective tests have value. Without the science itself,

being true at all. Now let's take a look at a couple of papers. Belief in astrology is a strategy for self-verification and coping with negative life events. This is a paper that's looking at like, why do people believe in astrology? So let's take a look at the discussion. The first hypothesis that exposure to astrological information verifies self-concept was largely supported, right? So this is a paper that's looking at basically like astrology is a way to

confirm things about yourself. It's a way for people to understand themselves a little bit better. The second thing that we can look at is belief in astrology has previously been related to cognitive biases and personality traits, such as intolerance of ambiguity and a greater need for information that reduces uncertainty about self and others.

So this is another kind of very common point that a lot of people will say is that astrology is a tool that helps people manage anxiety and uncertainty. So we see some scientific evidence for that, okay? So when we were looking at these responses on the internet, and people were like, yeah, you know, like astrology, like there's no real technical stuff to it, but it helps people soothe themselves. It helps people deal with uncertainty. It helps people learn about themselves. Like that's why it's useful. But we can go a little bit deeper. So we

So we can look at things like dissertations. So this is understanding the psychological significance of astrology in millennial women's lives. So here's what Dr. Floyd discovered. All participants expressed a defensive position regarding astrology that justified a complex reason for its use. So the way that I understand that is people were like, when you ask people, why do you believe in astrology? They're like, oh,

It's because this really complicated thing, right? No one's saying like, oh, like there's a stigma against astrology, basically. So anytime you ask people why they believe in it, they get defensive and they come up with some complicated thing. Pretty interesting. Consistent with what I would think. A theme of psychology, astrology being psychologically beneficial emerged in that the use of astrology level levies an intrapersonal value.

highly individualized sense of self-cohesion. So this is pretty consistent with that other research that we looked at that looks at kind of self-concept in astrology. Now, this is, I think, this is why I'm including the paper. I thought this finding was really interesting. Participants expressed how astrology brings an interpersonal community or shared identity that is conducive to compassion and connection. So on the one hand,

astrology has a large stigma against it. And everyone's like, oh my God, why do women believe in astrology? And on the other hand, there's a lot of, this dissertation looks at, and I think this is consistent, I've seen other research that supports this, that astrology forms a way for us to form, allows a way for us to form connections with other people.

Right. Because there's the pro astrology people and there's the anti astrology people. And if I'm being ostracized by these like people who are like, oh, it's pseudoscience, even though like, let's remember what is their understanding of astrology. Right. So when when you say, oh, yeah, astrology is BS. Are these the kinds of papers that you're looking at? Like when you conclude.

that astrology is all bullshit. This is what you're talking about, right? Are you referring to like these random columns that say, oh, your sun sign says this, therefore there'll be a dark stranger in your future, right? Y'all are familiar with all that. You know what that stuff meant. That's what you mean, right? So in this dissertation, it talks about how astrology is a method of being able to form connections with people.

So I think all of this stuff makes sense. So as a psychiatrist, you know, I'm very familiar with things that are not technically scientifically true that also can be very helpful to people. So other examples of this may be like religion, where religion, like, I know this is like

dangerous territory, but I don't know if there's any scientific existence for, for any scientific proof for the existence of God. I, at least I haven't seen it. If you disagree, please post something. I'm not saying that God isn't real. I'm just saying that I haven't seen any scientific existence of it. And as a psychiatrist, my approach is like, Hey, whatever works for the patient.

So the patient is an atheist. That can be a belief structure that's very helpful. If a patient is a theist, that can be a belief structure that's very helpful. There are studies that show that having a religious disposition or a spiritual disposition can be adaptive and help you be resilient against trauma and all this kind of stuff. So there's a difference between—and this is kind of what I'm saying—there's a difference between the technical truth of something and it being useful for humans and working for them, okay? But—

As we will see later, shockingly, astrology may have some technical truth to it in terms of its predictive value. So now that we've looked at sort of the psychological reasons why we may believe in astrology, we also have to look at the counter arguments, right? So what are the psychological, the broad strokes, psychological arguments that say that astrology is basically BS? This is a paper by Bertram Forer. So when people say that astrology is BS, there's actually a Wikipedia page about the Forer effect.

And the primary logical, psychological argument of astrology being BS is from this paper. This is the guy who did the experiment that proved that astrology is BS. So if y'all understand science,

I want y'all to think for a second about what the problems with this experiment are. The fallacy of personal validation, a classroom demonstration of gullibility. Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic of Los Angeles. OK, are there things that you can already see here that we would not accept as valid research evidence?

in today's day and age. So basically, this is a study that what this guy did was gave people in his class 13 statements that are like vague. And he's like, you have a great need for people to other people to admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned to your advantage. So he made these vague statements. And then he said, how many of these are true? And what he found is that like the most common

10 out of the 13 statements were true for like 10 people. So the majority of people agreed with these statements. And then he kind of concludes that like, okay, like this is the problem with astrology is that you make these vague statements, you know, or like generally like acceptable, like people will just like lean into. So you're kind of like vague. It's kind of like cold reading and some of these other like BS future reading kind of stuff. And he's like, yeah, this is kind of BS. And,

It's just all this ambiguity that goes into astrology. That's why people believe in it, because they make these vague statements that a lot of people will agree with. There are so many methodological problems with this. There's a lot of truth to it, right? So the first thing that we have to say is I cite this study. There's methodological problems in terms of consenting, and you don't do experiments on your students and things like that. I don't know if this was IRB approved, whatever. There are all kinds of problems with this study. But generally speaking, I'd agree, and the Forer effect has been shown in other studies as well, that if you make vague general statements,

a lot of people will like agree to them. This is why we use, you know, things like validated questionnaires that are specifically designed to tease apart. Like, so we use validated questionnaires in psychiatry, like the PHQ-9, for example, which is a screening test for depression. And the whole point of the PHQ-9 is that it's not vague. It's highly specific, right? So it separates the people who are depressed from the people who are not depressed or likelihood of being depressed from low likelihood of being depressed. It's technically what the PHQ-9 does.

This is a very unsophisticated experiment, is my point. And this also presumes that astrological predictions are always vague. Okay, so now I'm going to give you all like, so I think that this is a very true bias that human beings have, but it is not a bias that all astrologers use. So here are a couple of like common biases that we see with astrology. The first is that like they're, you know, very vague.

They tend to be like positive. So there's another bias where humans are like basically arrogant or narcissistic. We all believe we're above average. So if you make some vague statement about, oh yeah, like you've got like good times ahead, or like you're better than the average person, you're exceptional in some way, human beings will agree with that. So the first bias is if it's vague, we'll read into it based on our own projections. So we'll think it's true. Second bias is that we all think we're above average. So if any astrologer says you're special, you'll say yes to that.

Third bias is like a positive bias, where if I tell you, hey, like your life is going to be positive in the future, like we want to believe that. So we're more likely to agree with it. So there are all kinds of psychological biases, which astrology could absolutely and do absolutely play into with crappy astrologers. Now we get to a really, really, really important point. I got really worried about astrology maybe about 20 years ago.

And the reason was I met two astrologers who had eerily accurate predictions. So when you work with a good astrologer, we'll get to what that is in a second. It's all that tables and stuff that we saw. When you work with a good astrologer, they don't make vague statements. So I had astrologers...

who were making, like, incredibly accurate predictions. Like, in March of this year, or in March of next year, this negative, like, this part of your body is going to get infected. Like, you have a high likelihood of, like, this part of your body, like, getting infected. So be careful in March of this year. Protect this part of your body. And I was like...

That's not the four-effect kind of stuff. That's really, really very concrete kind of stuff. Then I developed what I thought was a really great test for astrology, which disables so many of the biases. If an astrologer can predict your life...

from a birth chart. Forget about the future because the moment that the future happens, we have all kinds of biases that enter into the picture. I want my future to be good. This could happen. Maybe they make a vague statement. I make some future statement, future event fit a vague prediction. Fair enough. So what I do when I work with an astrologer is that I ask them to tell me about my past. Tell me about the last five years of my life and be as specific as possible. This is my test for an astrologer. So when you're looking retrospectively,

Right. So if I if I just give you my like name and my date of birth and actually not even my name, my date of birth and my location, I don't even get my name. Sometimes I'll give him the first letter of my first name. That's it. I want you to tell me about the last five years of my life. I want you to tell me like just with this information. Am I married? Do I have kids like tell me about myself?

So what I found is that when I do this test with astrologers, I can quickly separate out the BS astrologers from the good ones. I've had some astrologers who will be very specific. They're like between September and November of this year, rough period, you had these kinds of problems, financial problems.

And next year, you had legal problems between these two or three months. More likely to be legal, more likely to be this. They're not always 100% definitive. And I've been stunned because like, and then I got worried, right? Because I was like, this is like weird. These people are making predictions, like don't seem to be fitting into these biases.

Does this mean astrology is real? Hold on a second. We have a, don't jump to conclusions. Don't put words in my mouth. We're going to look at a lot of data that shows astrology is BS too. We're going to look at everything. Okay. This, this is the part of the video where I think we have to like separate out like what astrology really is, or like what I think good astrology is from bad astrology. A lot of people think that astrology is like year of the dog, for example, like let's take like Chinese Zodiac where like some very surface level Chinese Zodiac stuff

is like, if you're born in the year of the dog, this is your personality, which presumes that everyone who's born in the same year has the same personality. And then you'll have these like, you know, newsletter, e-zine, Instagram, whatever the, like, oh, like the Capricorns. If you're a Capricorn in this month, this is going to happen. So if we say that there's like 12 or 13 birth signs, I don't even know how many birth signs there are. If we say

If we said there are 12 or 13, I don't think that like, you know, 8% of the population is going to have the same like future for this month. Right. That doesn't make any scientific sense to me. And a good astrologer will tell you the same thing. Like I've talked to astrologers who like have made good predictions. I was like, bro, how does this work? Like, how are you able to do this? Tell me about like, if people say like, oh, if you're a Gemini this month, like look for love.

I'm like, what's the difference between what they do and what you do? And they're like, well, that's like really generic, right? It's like generic advice. 8% of the population doesn't have the same future. Like that just doesn't make sense. So I said, how does it work? And he said, here's the way that I'd like to explain it to you. So what he said to me is like, imagine you have a phone number, right? So let's say your phone number is 10 digits. If I dial the first nine digits of your phone number,

and then I dial the last digit of your phone number, I get to you, right? I connect to you. Now, if I change one of the 10 digits by 10%,

Let's say the last digit in your phone number is a zero, and I change it to a one, and I dial all the other numbers the same. Where do I end up? With a completely different human being. So a good astrologer explained to me that this is why we need to know your date of birth, your time of birth, and your location of birth.

And if even one of those variables changes by 10%, the birth chart that you can get can be completely different. So there is a lot of variability between people. No two people have the same birth chart. No two people have... You can't make generic astrological predictions based on just the sun sign. The good astrologers are using a highly, highly technical, highly specific way to make predictions. Now...

The second thing to talk about is like, does astrology tell you the future? Does it make concrete predictions? And this is where the astrologers that I've worked with that I think are good are like, it's not like a prediction. It's a probability.

So what the birth chart tells you is like tendencies of forces in your life. So astrology is highly specific. So it's like your birth chart is unique. There's no generic like stuff for all Geminis. That I consider to be BS astrology, but I'm not an expert in astrology. If you're an expert in astrology, you're like, yeah, that is true. Here's why. Then fine. You can add it in the comments and we can talk about it. That's basically how astrology works. It's like highly technical. So now let's look at some papers and let's see what we actually find.

Cool, huh? Like, this is neat. Someone actually looked at, like, Swedish registry data and said, can we figure this out? Yeah.

among observed marital unions or associated with a lower risk of divorce. Now, here's a paper from the International Journal of Jyotish Research. Comparison of Vedic astrology birth charts of celebrities with ordinary people, an empirical study. This is a cool study. The study is like, in some birth charts, we say, you are going to be very famous.

Ah, you have sun in your first house? You're going to be famous one day. Oh! So they said, okay, cool. So if sun in the first house correlates with people being famous, we should be able to look at a bunch of famous people, and we should find sun in the first house or whatever the fuck, right? If principles we have tested were true, we should have seen significant differences in the total negativity or positivity of at least one planet, and we should be able to look at a bunch of famous people.

House or lord of the house in the test, but there were none. Thus, our results prove that neither of these principles are valid individually nor in combination. Two of our earlier experiments on similar lines for other pairs of groups, namely mentally disabled versus intelligent and cancer versus no cancer, have shown similar results for the same set of principles. It shows just how invalid they are across the board and beyond any doubt.

Since the principles we tested are something that one cannot do away with, in the everyday practice of astrology, their invalidity proven through our test raises many questions about the accuracy of predictions of Vedic astrology in general and career in particular. So this person was like, look, y'all, you guys claim, y'all astrologers claim that there's all this complicated crap.

So here's what I'm going to do. Here are all the principles that y'all claim are true. What I'm going to do, I'm going to take all these principles, aggregate data analysis. I'm going to do t-tests. One-tailed t, these are tailed t-tests. And what I'm going to find is that we can do all of these mathematical analyses. We can aggregate all of this data. Percent of average number of rules complied with. If you comply with all the rules, like this person complied with 59% of the rules. Are they a celebrity? Are they not a celebrity? So they did this again for...

for astrological charts of cancer disease persons versus people who never had it. So like, okay, if y'all can make predictions that if you've got this crap in this house at this time,

And by the way, the house and the time is like this diagram, y'all. Like, so if I've got like Taurus and Venus over here in my chart, this means I'm going to be famous. This means I'm going to have cancer. So they have all these rules. That's how they make their predictions. And they're like, let's test the rules. And what we tend to find is what they did the same thing, same kind of study, right? So they figured out one methodology. They applied the methodology. They found that it was not disingenuous.

didn't have any weight to it, right? Didn't show anything that astrology could make any predictions. Applied it to cancer. So this is good. They're thorough. They applied it to cancer. They applied it to celebrity and they applied it to like one other thing. I forget what they said, right? This isn't some vague generalized prediction. This is like y'all say like, oh, it's so complicated. Like it's so detailed. You got to do all these calculations. You got to make all these birth charts. Okay, fine. We're going to look at all your principles. We're going to take a bunch of people. We're going to

average everything together, and we're going to find that there is no emergent effect. Let's look at one other thing. So this is important. The methodology is important. So here is what this study actually looked at, is looking at information on the date of birth. We determined the zodiac sign of both the index individual and their spouse, yielding 144 zodiac sign combinations. So they basically look at which sign are you? Are you a Gemini? Did you marry a Capricorn?

If you were a Gemini, you married a Capricorn. Are you a Capricorn, you married a Gemini. Are you a Taurus who married an Aries? Are you an Aries who married a Capricorn? So they basically did sun sign of you and sun sign of your spouse and compared the two and they said basically it's BS. Okay, so now let's take a look at some other papers. Interesting.

Studies involving astrology and psychiatry have mostly found conflicting results, with astrology being criticized as unscientific and also lacking an objective assessment method for being scientifically tested. We tested the predictive ability of astrology using the Indian system in identifying mental illness on 150 subjects.

75 with illness and 75 without. Four astrologers, blind to the subjects, interpreted the computer-generated birth chart derived from the subject's gender, date, time, place of birth. Predictions were matched with clinical details at the first assessment. Kappa coefficients suggested a moderate agreement. So this is an important research thing. This means that they had four astrologers do this, and they found that astrologers basically agree with each other pretty well. So the astrologers didn't disagree. So there's internal consistency. Doesn't mean that their predictions were accurate. Do you all understand the difference?

It's like if I ask four psychiatrists to evaluate from ADHD, how much agreement is there? That's not whether they could all be wrong or they could all be right. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about how consistent is the prediction, not how accurate. Okay, so viewed as a diagnostic test, astrology showed a good sensitivity and specificity for identifying mental illness of more than 75% of people for lifetime mental illness. Okay.

and more than 80% for the current mental illness. However, the study showed a poor match in predicting the symptom cluster and the time of onset of symptoms. So this is crazy, okay? Like, this is nuts. Sample size of 150 people that is showing that four astrologers can predict the presence of mental illness in your lifetime. Now that may be, let's take a look at when this study was. This is 2018, pre-pandemic.

Because now it's like, eh, easy to predict. Everyone's mentally ill. This is two years pre-pandemic, back when things were good. They're able to predict a lifetime of mental illness and whether you're currently mentally ill 80% of the time, although they're not able to predict what kind of mental illness do you have. So are you depressed? Are you anxious? Do you have schizophrenia, PTSD? They're like, eh, we don't know. Or their predictions were not accurate, we should say. So that's really interesting. How do we make sense of that?

Right. So they're blinded. It's a prospective study. They're blinded. We had four of them test and the sample size is pretty big. OK, now another dissertation. Applications of astrology to health psychology, psychological and astrological factors and fertility treatment outcome. So as a psychiatrist, the number one reason why women that I work with pursue astrology is fertility.

This is the most anxiety-provoking thing for women that gets them into astrology and acupuncture and all kinds of other stuff. So this is a dissertation that is looking at fertility predictions based on astrological factors. Data set of 114 treatments experienced by 27 women. So small sample size. It's a dissertation. Data set was divided into two groups.

Successful outcome where successful outcome is defined as baby resulting from treatment and failed outcome. Contacts of Venus-Jupiter associated in traditional astrology with fertility and childbirth were compared for presence and absence at the time of fertility treatment outcome for both groups. So I think what this paper is, what this dissertation is looking at is when you administer fertility treatment, if Venus and Jupiter are in the right spot for your chart, does it predict the success of

of fertility treatment. If you all need to rewind the video and listen to that sentence again, you can. Okay, so now it's like, okay, when we give you fertility treatment, if Venus and Jupiter are in the right place, does it impact your treatment? Secondary progression and transit systems were used and it was found that major beneficial contacts...

were significantly likely to be present at times of treatment resulting in birth of live baby. Astrological indicators of reproductive problems were then compared between a group of women with history of fertility problems and people with no known history. Presence of the factors in the fertility group was significant. So if your birth chart

...shows presence of fertility problems. The prediction here is 0.0019, a p-value of less than 0.05, which means it's statistically significant. That's a strong finding, okay? This paper also looked at psychological factors, personal depression, clinic location, astrological factors, and, like, this is kind of nuts. In Study 2, when comparing Study 2 fertility treatment women with Study 1 control group, non-fertility treatment women with no reported history...

They basically found the presence of fertility treatment history was replicated. So that's statistically significant as well. So why do women believe in astrology? That's a question we started with like an hour ago. And I got to say, y'all, I think like astrology is one of these things where it comes down to this basic problem of the people who are studying it don't understand it.

And the people who really understand it aren't doing research studies. So it's starting to change some, especially if we look at like, so I was looking at Hindu astrology, like Vedic astrology. I think that like when I look at the studies in more detail, here's what I find. So astrology is, if you look at studies where you have astrologers examining an individual's birth chart and they are making predictions,

specific predictions. Those studies are small, dissertations, small sample sizes, you know, very few of these studies published. They're showing a scary level of predictability. If you look at studies that are studying astrology by eye,

aggregating or averaging astrological effects. Those studies are negative. But I want you all to understand this is very, very, very important, right? This is where you have to understand research methodology. These two things are not the same kind of study at all. One is using the actual astrological methods to make predictions and then testing that against what happened in the real world. The other is

is taking theories of astrology, like if you have the sun in this house, and I average together like 100 people, does the sun in this house have this aggregate effect that we can detect at a population level? Those studies are negative. Now, does astrology work? Depends on how you define work.

So there are plenty of psychological reasons like projection and self-concept and managing uncertainty where it seems like astrology has therapeutic value. There are also plenty of things like the four-er effect. I think the original experiment is trash. But since then, there have been hundreds or thousands or millions of experiments that show that astrology is prone to all of these biases.

But I think the kind of astrology that is prone to bias is the same kind of astrology that shows negative effects when researched, which is these broad strokes. If you're a Gemini, and by the way, all of the other Geminis, the 8% of the people on the planet who are also Geminis, y'all all have the same future. Y'all are all going to win the lottery this month. It doesn't work.

It's BS. So I think there's psychological confounders that cause people to believe in astrology. I think there are psychological reasons that are very valid, which bring astrology a lot of value.

And I think it's kind of creepy that there are some studies that show that astrology can make real predictions that are pretty good. And that's what I've seen in my life, too, that like I've seen both. I worked. So I've seen 10 astrologers. Eight of them are trash. They're like, oh, you're going to be happy after you overcome hardship. And a couple of them are like, bro, be careful where you put your dick this month because.

You know, the person that you have the opportunity to sleep with may have an STI. And it's like, what the fuck, man? That's an actual prediction you're making in my life? And like, it's wild. Okay? So what does this mean for you? This means, first of all, we're a community that values critical thinking. We value science.

but we also value experience. We value truth, right? So my whole thing is like, there are things that I've learned from meditation and things that I've studied in neuroscience that I both think are both valid. And I also believe that there is

Science is still in its infancy, y'all. Just because science doesn't show proof of something doesn't mean that it isn't true. People have been saying meditation has been working for 10,000 years. Science just figured that crap out. For the majority of history of science, since science became a thing in maybe like...

1500s, right? 500 years ago, science became a thing. And 450 of those years, even when we discovered neuroanatomy and the brain and SSRIs and all this stuff, everyone was like, yeah, meditation doesn't do anything. It doesn't do anything. So like science is still in its infancy. We haven't really critically studied things. What we found is that when, and this happened in meditation. So what was the difference between meditation being a pseudoscience to meditation being science? Do you all know?

So this is literally what happened. In the 60s, there were all these groups of gurus. I'm guru. I'm coming to the US because white people are rich and Indian people are poor. And I'm going to teach them meditation. You have these gurus who came.

And then you had a bunch of hippies who started meditating. And some of those hippies were at places like UC Berkeley and Stanford, which are also powerhouse academic institutions. These people learned meditation and then they became researchers and they started designing high quality trials in a way that will be able to detect the effect of meditation. And now we have tons of research. Oh, now like now meditation is scientific.

It's been scientific. It's been correct long before it was scientific. So I think that's kind of where we are with astrology. Now, do I think that you should go see an astrologer? Like, if you feel like it, go for it. Do I think you should base your life based on astrological predictions? Hell nah. Just because there may be some weird scientific merit to astrology does not mean that all the people who are running their life based on these broad...

astrological predictions are like correct. Look man,

You're watching this video. The world is a wild place. No one knows what the hell is happening. At a minimum, if you feel like exploring it, explore it. And I'll equip you with this one thing, right? So if you're trying to figure out, okay, Dr. K, this has me interested. I want to try it. What should I do? This is the concrete piece of advice I'll leave you with. Before you get your birth chart made, and first of all, don't get astrological predictions from someone who's not making a birth chart. That requires your date,

a birth, time of birth, and location, and gender. If they don't get those three things as part of the astrological prediction, I would not use them. Second thing, to protect yourself from the bias, tell these people I want you to tell me about the last five years of my life. Ask them about your past. Ask them about your upbringing. Ask them about all this kind of stuff. And if they're wrong about all that, it's BS. So hope you guys enjoyed it, or maybe get an astrological prediction so you don't need it.

Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.