User talk:Apagogeron

Welcome!

I will copy here a few of my Talk postings and other thoughts that I consider to be of key importance:

Please feel free to post on my Talk page. Apagogeron (talk) 00:54, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Remove straw man and authoritarian arguments

The Wikipedia Astrology article is riddled with straw man arguments and authoritarian decrees and the Talk page is filled with silly discussions over these rational fallacies. Editors should remove these fallacies.

Astrology is a very old discipline and unfortunately it has outgrown, and is now misrepresented by, some of its own language. In a similar way, the branch of astrology that became meteorology is a misrepresentation because it is not the study of meteors, but rather of weather. The use of ancient terminology leads people who are ignorant of astrology, or people who are just deviant literalists, to accuse astrology of having pseudoscientific claims. For these people to set up these terms as straw men and require astrologers to defend the literal meanings is a fallacy that violates the rational criterion of relevance.

The study of astrology connects the modern world with ancient traditions. The word "astrology" derives from "star" but astrologers will study whatever celestial bodies they wish to study, just like the meteorologists are not confined to the study of meteors to forecast weather. That astrology must only study "stars" is irrelevant and to argue over this is silly and irrational.

To insist that astrology is a pre-Copernican view that equates to belief in a flat Earth, is ignorant. Astrology uses a relativistic frame of reference that no scientist would argue with. It maps the celestial bodies relative to the person or thing to be studied, which is placed at the center, and this is neither the Sun nor the Earth. What we know as stars have always been stars. All other bodies in the solar system, including the Sun and Moon, are considered to be, for want of a better word, "planets" of the person or subject to be studied because these bodies all move in some interesting fashion around the subject, which is at the center.

Imagine now that you are at the center of your own universe and the planets and stars around you are your planets and your stars, because this is your universe. If you think this sounds New Age, then you've come to the right place. This "new" point of view is also very ancient. To say that astrology is Earth-centered, or must not call the Sun and Moon planets, is a straw man designed to start a silly, irrational argument.

The same goes for the difference between the signs and some of the constellations that have the same names. Astrologers have known about this and made their choice more than 2000 years ago. Signs are measured from the vernal point and are unrelated to the starry constellations. To confuse signs with constellations because of the similarity in names is silly and irrational.

Planetary or stellar "influence" is not a causal effect emanating from the planets and stars that astrologers directly measure. Everyone knows that the meanings in astrology are inferred from empirical observations, despite the mechanical implications of word "influence." Similarly, in some new sciences ordinary words fail or are used metaphorically and even whimsically. To argue over the semantics of this is silly and irrational.

The "symbolic language" of astrology is not a mystery or ambiguous. It has followed the same development that any syntactical representation of symbols such as used in chemistry, mathematics, or any written language uses and the results can be seen and understood in any astrology text. To argue over the analysis of "symbols" or the speaker of a "language" with regard to astrology is a straw man and is silly and irrational.

Astrological "rulership" does not mean that the planets manipulate people by remote control. "Rulership" may not be the best word, but it is the tradition and astrologers know what it means. It is a non-judgmental observation of one property or thing regarded as a set that typically indicates the presence of other properties or things as members, often theorized as a correlation. To argue over the literal meaning of “rulership” is silly and irrational.

These are all straw man and red herring fallacies and editors should not be drawn into semantic arguments and silly, irrational debates over them.

Throughout the Wikipedia astrology article, astrology is conceptually misrepresented as being some sort of "alternative" to science, as an absolutist, black and white, either-or situation of conflicting paradigms battling for scientific supremacy. This is not the case. Like other disciplines adopted by New Age thinkers, astrology is "complementary." It fills in the voids left by conventional, more scientific approaches, which are nonetheless necessary for healthy living and informed perspectives.To characterize modern science and astrology as adversarial is again a straw man designed to start a silly irrational argument.

Over the course of history, astrology has had its own reforms and revolutions in thought. Paracelsus understood astrology as a question of "correlations" between macroscopic and microscopic worlds rather than direct physical influences, because no causal connections could be determined. This was a radical theory at the time, but gradually the idea of non-causal correlations became adopted. Francis Bacon added to this with his suggestion that the stars "rather incline than compel." This represented a puzzle for astrologers and scientists interested in astrology to figure out and evaluate. The methods by which correlational effects can be mathematically measured and weighed to show inclinations is relatively new in astrology, and have been statistically demonstrated in falsifiable tests only within the past 30 years.

The Science section of the article is filled with a succession of the subjective beliefs of one scientist after another, from al-Farabi to Neil deGrasse Tyson. It directly emulates the controversial 1975 Humanist "Objections to Astrology" article signed by 186 leading scientists. Astronomer Carl Sagan objected to the "Objections" article because the scientists argued solely on the basis of their own authority and this gives the impression of closed mindedness. Physicist Paul Feyerabend compared the “Objections” article to the Malleus Maleficarum, which launched the Inquisition, only he regarded it as being worse.

These claims by notable scientists against astrology that Wikipedia has listed are more of the same thing. They are not scientific at all, but are arguments from authority and arguments from ignorance by people who have not studied astrology and have no idea what they are talking about. Editors should be mindful of these fallacies and allow only factual objective information where science is concerned.

To declare that astrology is a pseudoscience from the outset is detrimental to legitimate scientists who may wish to investigate it. Scientists have a right to study and test whatever they want and to challenge other scientists based on their evaluations and discoveries. Because of recent empirical assessments, in particular the reversal of the renowned 1985 Shawn Carlson study, which in 2009 was found to support astrology, and improved methods of ranking and rating data, there is an expectation of further scientific advances in astrology.

No one, least of all astrologers, expects all of astrology to be amenable to scientific evaluation. For example, there has been a lively proliferation and discourse of psychological theories among astrologers, such as those postulated by Carl Jung. Yet only a few of these theories may ever be scientifically evaluated. The theories of astrology are complex and its practice requires intuition to deal with the combination of many variables. For these reasons and others, such as the scarcity of accurate data and the lack of funding, astrology has not been easy to scientifically investigate. Apagogeron (talk) 21:18, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Systemic WP bias against astrology

As a longtime amateur student of astrology, I am concerned that many of the misrepresentations of astrology and the vehemence against it that one can find online and in the media are traceable to the Wikipedia article on astrology. Often pieces from the article are copied verbatim. Astrologers are not well represented among WP editor demographics and this has resulted in a systemic bias against it. Astrology courses are not taught in Western universities and professors do not normally have any contact with serious astrologers. The biased POV in Wikipedia is attributable to the many science leaders who also fall into this category. In order to avoid an unpleasant sense of cognitive dissonance when asked about astrology, they tend to make anti-astrology declarations based solely on the weight of their own personal authority. I believe this habit does more damage than good. The few scientists who have actually taken the trouble to understand astrology and have taken the time to examine the methods that have been used to experimentally test astrology have a very different story to tell and this very interesting and revealing story is not getting across. What Wikipedia needs is a way to counter this systemic bias.

Because of WP demographics there is a systemic bias against astrology. This last essay contains the following suggestions to counter systemic bias in Wikipedia:

Change the demographic of Wikipedia. Encourage friends and acquaintances that you know have interests that are not well-represented on Wikipedia to edit. If you are at high school or university, contact a professor in minority, women's, or critical studies, explain the problem, and ask if they would be willing to encourage students to write for Wikipedia. Contact minority or immigrant organizations in your area to see if they would be interested in encouraging their members to contribute. The worst they could say is, "No". But keep in mind that immigrant organizations may well have a different point of view than the majority of people in the countries they emigrated from (their members may, for example, be members of a minority themselves or may have emigrated because of a disagreement with the government not shared by the majority of the population), which introduces its own systemic bias.

I managed to encourage one friend who is interested in astrology, like me not an astrologer, to help represent astrology and help change the demographics of Wikipedia. Apagogeron (talk) 23:56, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Astrology ban March 21, 2011

Please see [1]. Moreschi (talk) 16:48, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I am truly sorry for the intense focus on "psuedoscience" and the edit war. I did not make any edits to the article myself during the whole duration but only entries on the Talk page. I could see the war coming but could not stop it. I was willing to compromise with the rewording suggested. I wanted to edit other parts of the article and related articles, for example the Shawn Carlson study in the Astrology and Psychology article; there is a very good recent study made of it. But pseudoscience is a very loaded word and when a word like that is used, many people become offended. From reading other Talk pages I see that there has been some discussion on using Paul Thagard's criteria for pseudoscience, but his criteria are no better than any of the others, by Popper, Kuhn, etc. Any astrologer who reads the literature and attends conferences would have no problem thinking of many exceptions. Thagard's criteria could even be hilarious in a lofty ivory tower sort of way, except that the pseudo-skeptic pseudoscience POV pushers, like others with a hidebound fundamentalists agenda, are deadly serious and it's not funny at all. Astrologers tend to be very liberal, open minded, inquisitive, sensitive, and inventive and this clashes with Wikipedians, who tend to have completely opposite qualities. There are just different sorts of geeks in the world and they don't all like each other. There is a well known problem of demarcation with regard to pseudoscience and the only thing the more recent philosophers of science seem to be in agreement on is that it is a pejorative word. This article will always have a major problem as long as this word stays. People with an interest in astrology will not want to contribute to such a biased article, or if they do, even with the best of intentions, well, you saw what just happened. The article could be a very rich source of information on history, culture, relationships, politics, war, economics, and describe the multitudes of studies, discourses, and techniques that astrologers share and use. As it is, the article is a toxic cesspool of ignorance with a distinctly hateful quality. It is a complete write off. The more enlightened readers can see that. Apagogeron (talk) 23:56, 21 March 2011 (UTC)