Is Astrology A Science?
Kyle Pierce 00:05
Hello, and welcome to another award winning edition of Astrology Hotline. My name is Kyle and hosting with me today is Tristan Paylor.
Tristan Paylor 00:15
Hello everyone.
Kyle Pierce 00:18
Tristan, this dog has eaten a kind of sandwich was about three
Tristan Paylor 00:22
quarters of a toasted Western. He doesn't weigh a lot more than a toasted Western and he's still following me around hoping for treats so
00:30
yeah, he is still hanging in there.
Tristan Paylor 00:33
He's hanging in there.
00:36
Maybe he's small number of onions. He's
Tristan Paylor 00:38
he's having a little food coma at the moment. But I mean, he's, he sleeps 18 hours a day, so it's not that unusual for him. 18 hours of sleep a day sounds pretty good. To me that's asleep is definitely my number one hedonistic pleasure. I would rather sleep than eat. It's the best.
Kyle Pierce 01:02
And it almost seems to happen. Right before we record an episode that I sleep, just for whatever reason, I just can't get to sleep. And I sleep like two hours a night for two nights in a row. Almost a consistent pattern. We like? Yeah, I know. I just I love this show. So much that can't wait. I can't wait to see your face.
Tristan Paylor 01:28
But I think you're also probably very excited to share the results of the project that you've been working on probably keeping yourself awake at night thinking about in order to prepare for this episode.
Kyle Pierce 01:40
I am especially excited about that. But that we'll have to wait. We should probably introduce our first and maybe only question today because this one is say a you know when I was in Japan, once upon a time they had a super mega Mac. You could only get them in Japan. This was a huge burger had, I think four patties on it. It was just like you, you know have to unhinge your jaw to get it into your mouth was really quite an impressive burger. And that is what this question is a very, very impressive Japanese burger.
Tristan Paylor 02:27
I'd say that's accurate. Yeah.
Kyle Pierce 02:29
And we'll go ahead and actually let him ask the question for himself. Hi.
02:38
Hi, dad. Hi, Tristan. My question is astrology is astrology a science?
02:45
Excellent question, buddy.
Tristan Paylor 02:49
Do you want to maybe share with our listeners who this question came from?
Kyle Pierce 02:53
Ah, you know, it's kind of this huge fan of mine that, you know, it's like a group you can't seem to quite question is from my son, Declan. And it's actually really impressed with quality of that question. Because, you know, it's not as straightforward or simple of an answer, as you might
Tristan Paylor 03:17
expect. And of course, it's always kids who ask the best and hardest questions. Yeah, just get straight to the heart of things.
Kyle Pierce 03:26
Yeah. When he asked that question, I I was sort of torn between because I wanted to like, you know, you always want your kids to be like, impressed by you. But I, you know, I had to like think about it. I was like, you know, as we've been like researching and and talking about this question, I think Tristan and I have landed in maybe slightly different camps on it.
Tristan Paylor 03:55
I think I think we're in pretty different camps.
Kyle Pierce 03:59
I don't know how hard how hard you're, you're no is my answer vacillates between a good a maybe? To a very soft, yes. Depending on your definition of science,
Tristan Paylor 04:17
and that is that is the difficulty with this question. Is defining science in the first place? I mean, my I would take the position of a hard no, that astrology is not a science, but in the spirit of scientific thinking and inquiry and skepticism. I am certainly open to changing my position on that should you know overwhelming evidence to the contrary appear.
Kyle Pierce 04:45
We will get into it. But maybe to start to talk a little bit about what the definition of sciences and I have a couple here that I rather like because there isn't one
Tristan Paylor 05:01
Now this is why there's an entire discipline called the philosophy of science. Because this, the answer or the definition, has been hotly discussed and debated for a very long time.
Kyle Pierce 05:17
And I think astrology and I've been kind of uniquely positioned in a weird sort of gray zone between philosophy and science, or spirituality and science, I think it's actually kind of what I love about it. I kind of see astrology as like a I don't for me, it was like, being a skeptical person my whole life. Like a skeptics gateway to whatever God is. And in my personal, most reverent opinion on it, don't always feel that way. But let's, let's, let's talk about definitions. Now, maybe just to start off Ducklin, if your teacher asks you, or it shows up on a test, no, say no, this is you, we're not going to you know, the, your teacher is not going to maybe fully agree with with me, maybe maybe interest in more but so the whole idea of science or you know, the word science, multiple versions of this. It's derived from the Latin word skier just means to know. The Merriam Webster definition is knowledge about the natural world that is based on facts learned through experiments, and observation. The Science Council defines science, not so much a definition as a checklist. But science must include objective observation, measurement, and data. Possibly, although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool, evidence, experiment and or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses, induction reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples, repetition or reproducibility, critical analysis and verification and testing. So basically, it needs to be need to be able to reproduce the results that you find from science experiment, so that it can be, you know, potentially disproved or verified by other humans, who probably preferably call themselves scientists.
Tristan Paylor 07:54
Yeah, the peer review is very important in defining something as scientific as a way of preventing bias and making sure that studies adhere to standards of accuracy and solid sound methodology. Yeah. Evidence to is it's a word that comes up in that definition. And I think it's important to understand that in a scientific context, evidence isn't necessarily there's a difference between the evidence that we might use to make sort of everyday subjective decisions about our own lives versus the evidence that counts towards something being considered scientific. Anecdotal evidence is not scientific, you know, me telling you a story about a thing that happened yesterday. That is not scientific evidence,
Kyle Pierce 08:51
I think, yeah, science is really an attempt to identify universal truths, perhaps. Objective Truth.
Tristan Paylor 09:01
Yeah, I went I went down quite a rabbit hole with this. I am. And you know, full disclaimer, I am an absolute layperson when it comes to these topics. I am neither a scientist or a philosopher. There's a really good YouTube video. There's a series on YouTube called Crash Course philosophy. That just explains in very clear language, the sort of, you know, basics that you need to know about different philosophers and their positions on things. And one of the most influential philosophers of science, who has heavily influenced how we define science today was a man named Karl Popper. And something that Karl Popper observed, he was a contemporary of both Freud and Einstein so he was alive during you know, a pretty in a very active era in the history of modern science for sure. and something that Carl noticed, in terms of the difference between Freud and Einstein's approaches is that Freud could make anything fit into his theories. You know, he could make things fit his theories very well in hindsight. But Einstein actively sought to disprove his own theories. He, you know, when he came up with the general theory of relativity, you know, his actions were, in order to, you know, sort of test the validity of his theory he set out to disprove it, he intentionally sought out evidence to disprove it. And that was a distinction that Karl Popper thought was really important. You're not making the data fit your theories, you are actively trying to disprove your own theories, that is part of the scientific method in his philosophy of science. So according to him, the according to Popper, the characteristics of science are falsifiability, testability and refute ability. And his definition of science is often used to define pseudoscience, by contrast, and according to this definition, Freud's theories are definitely pseudoscience.
Kyle Pierce 11:22
He was a little I mean, he definitely had some sort of thing is hard to organize this conversation, but
Tristan Paylor 11:30
Oh, yeah.
Kyle Pierce 11:33
You know, Freud laid a lot of foundations for a lot of, you know, modern psychology that had, you know, good solid, were based in you know, good reasonable thought, and, but, you know, he was a little coked, up quite often. And he got some pretty wild ideas. And I think his own particular inclinations maybe got a little projected onto maybe his his view of, you know, general human psychology, which I think is a, you know, can be an issue, when studying psychology is, you know, your perspective, your ideas about other people's psychology are going to be very much framed through the lens of your own psychology, it's kind of hard to separate the two.
Tristan Paylor 12:26
Yeah, and I mean, that's one of the things that one of the sort of purposes of science, I guess, is to reduce or remove that subjective bias. Which is where, you know, you get things like, studies need to be double blind, and you need especially, I mean, doing any kind of study about human beings, and how we behave, or how we think or feel is incredibly difficult, because you have to really design your studies carefully to take human bias into account and try to eliminate it wherever possible, not just in yourself, but in your subjects, and the other researchers working with you. Which is something that, you know, I'll talk about one of the more famous studies on whether or not astrology has any sort of predictive validity or any is like, able, in a scientific sense to say anything about people's personality traits, or what have you, you know, when you're designing science tests that have to do scientific research that has to do with personality, and you're dealing with like human people and their personalities, and like, their level of self awareness. Yeah, is like really important to the outcome of your test. That's really tricky.
Kyle Pierce 13:48
Like one of the big things that's in leave out of the definitions of, especially like harder sciences, like physics, or chemistry is quantify ability, like being able to measure something in numbers. And it's kind of one of the standards for scientific rigorousness like how science is this kind of science and quantify ability is maybe one of the big hard science elements. But human behavior is incredibly hard to study in a scientifically rigorous way because humans, as human beings as subjects are contaminated with uncontrollable and unaccounted border variables. Were like, way too, too complicated to be able to control the conditions of experiments around something as varied and subjective, as you know, the experience of human personality.
Tristan Paylor 14:51
Yeah, one of the, like, an example of studies on astrology being kind of tricky, and the more Our well designed research into astrology takes this into account is that if somebody has any sort of pre knowledge of astrology, and biases them, they they can be, you know, if you're, I think they're I don't have the reference to this specific study right now. But I will also include a Google doc in the show notes with all of all of my references and resources if people are curious to start jumping down the same rabbit hole I did, as a result of listening to this episode, because I have really jumped down a rabbit hole. But there was one study on sun signs that did find a slight correlation between somebody a sun sign and their personality traits. But when the study was redone, and controlled for people who, you know, have some knowledge of their own sun sign, there was no correlation. So people's perception of themselves is influenced by what they know of their birth charts or by what they know of themselves. Astrologically so, you know, I would be a pretty unreliable person to base the accuracy of astrology on because I know my chart inside and out. And I would know, you know, if you gave me a bunch of random descriptions based on astrology, I know so much about astrology, like I would know which descriptions were probably referring to what, and I would be biased towards picking the ones that line up with my chart, not necessarily because my chart accurately describes my personality, but because I am used to seeing myself through the lens of my
Kyle Pierce 16:36
chart. Yeah, that's mean, absolutely. But I mean, that also gets into maybe one of the issues with maybe trying to approach astrology from a scientific perspective, is that you know, what is it that astrology is measuring? Is it personality that astrology is the main indication of or is it you know, is it other things?
Tristan Paylor 17:05
Well, that's the thing is that astrology kind of studies everything. You know, there's astrology, there's financial astrology people who Yeah, people try to predict stock market crashes with astrology people. You know, it's, there's horror area astrology, there's Electional Astrology which tries to pick you know, a good time for an event, whether that's a wedding or starting a business. Anything and everything you can think of people will apply astrology to it. So that does become you know, in order to really test astrology, you kind of have to test 1,000,001 Things like you got to test well you know, can astrology predict stock market crashes? Can astrology say something about human personality? Can astrology tell us something about a good time for an event? Yeah, there's so many so many things that gets applied to Yeah. So the question of like, what is it useful for becomes really complex?
Kyle Pierce 18:00
How would you even design an experiment around that? Even I don't know I feel like most if you're trying to make something happen and you're using an electrical chart, you know your art your experiments already can't really experiment with X you already trying to make it happen. You know, like you're already Yeah, you know, putting effort towards that and that's a variable you can't really rule out and think also most people's understanding of astrology is that there is a human factor you know, you have your you're interacting with it. Say it's I mean, it's inherently so intertwined with humans engaging with it, you know, that it's being tampered with always
Tristan Paylor 18:48
i Is it okay if I if I talked about Sean Carlson's experiment, which has to do specifically with astrology and personality. So Shawn Carlson, was actually an undergraduate student, when he worked with his professors to design a scientific experiment to test the validity of astrology is ability to say something about human personality. And this experiment was done in 1985. And it was published in the journal Nature, it was peer reviewed, and published in a reputable scientific journal. And one of the reasons
19:34
again, sorry 8519 8019 85.
Tristan Paylor 19:37
So one of the remarkable things about this particular study is that Shawn Carlson, you know, was knowledgeable enough about astrology that he understood? I mean, he understood the common philosophical and scientific arguments and just common sense arguments against astrology and he also understood the critics As astrologers towards those arguments, and so he wanted to design a study that took the astrologers point of view into account. So this study involves 28 actual astrologers, who not only agreed to be part of the study, but they participated in the design of the study. I feel like you know, the best way to sort of explain it is just to read the beginning. The sort of Prelude, written in the published study itself, where Carlson says, although there have been many published tests of astrology, those with positive results, those that confirm the astrologers thesis have been largely dismissed by scientists on the grounds of technique. Those with negative results disputing the astrologers thesis have largely been dismissed by astrologers on the grounds that they failed to test what the astrologers considered to be the essential aspects of their work. Indeed, astrologers complain that most scientific tests have tested the scientists concept of astrology, not astrology, as practiced by the reputable astrological community, both criticisms may be valid. My purpose has been to avoid these criticisms by designing an experiment that would meet the tight specifications of both the scientific and astrological communities. Such an experiment was designed with the help of scientists, statisticians and astrologers, we decided to test what we shall call for simplicity, the fundamental thesis of natal astrology, as the proposition that the positions of the planets, including the sun and moon, and other objects defined by astrologers, at the moment of birth can be used to determine the subjects general personality traits, and tendencies and temperament and behavior, and to indicate the major issues which the subject is likely to encounter. And so both the astrologers and the scientists came up with their own hypothesis where the astrologers determined ahead of time, like, they made a prediction about what the results would be. And the scientists made a prediction about what the results would be. And the astrologers predicted that it would be however much like a specific variable above chance, and the scientists hypothesize that the astrologers would not do any better than chance. And they took a lot of things, a lot of the astrologers concerns into account like, when it comes to researching astrology, you know, a lot of astrologers will say, you need to have accurate birth times if you're looking at birth chart data. So they ensure that, you know, birth times would be accurate. And they also tried to account for potential bias on part of the non astrologer subjects of the study, you know, like, say, people who might have a tendency to pick astrological descriptions that seem to fit based on their sun sign, because they have prior knowledge of their sun sign that bias would skew the results. So they have controls, they have like double blind controls in place for all of those kinds of things. It's like a really, really remarkable study. And if you can get a copy of it, I highly recommend reading it. So they did, they essentially did two studies they used, they picked a Personality Inventory. And they chose a Personality Inventory that the astrologers involved in the study said, lined up the best with the sort of personality traits that astrology tends to discuss, and that was the California Personality Inventory. So, the researchers you know, gave the inventory to the subjects gathered their birth data. And the two parts of the study were having the non astrologer subjects choose, you know, descriptions of themselves that came from the Personality Inventory test, or the astrologer has written interpretations of their birth charts. And they had no idea what was what. And the other part of the test was showing the astrologers descriptions of personalities based on the results of the Personality Inventory and asking the astrologers to match those up with charts. So they had no idea who any of these people are, they're just given personality descriptions, and birth charts and they got to figure out what's going on. Yeah. And there's like there's a whole there are a whole bunch of details that I'm not getting into. Because, you know, it's, it would be boring to just like, you know, read out an entire nine page study, I want to do that podcast.
25:15
Hard but when it sounds like a challenge,
Tristan Paylor 25:19
it's, it's fascinating. And the results were that the astrologers did not perform any better than chance. The first part of the study,
25:29
were testing.
Tristan Paylor 25:33
Are you testing while
Kyle Pierce 25:34
testing like the astrologers ability? Or are you testing you know, the ballot study of astrology?
Tristan Paylor 25:41
So the astrologers that were chosen were not chosen at random. The researchers wanted to make sure that they were choosing reputable respected astrologers. So they consulted with the National Geo, is it the NC gr? The, I can never remember how to actually say, do cosmic research and CGR okay, I'm looking this up right now, because I'm embarrassed that I can never National Council. That's what throws me off is that it's the council. That's what C stands for. The National Council for geocosmic research, which is a huge, astrological organization that is extremely well respected. You know, people, they have events where astrologers give talks. And so they consulted with the NC gr and chose astrologers, who were members of the NC gr in good standing, and were respected by their community. There were a couple of astrologers who joined the the study after hearing about it, that weren't part of the initial round of astrologers who agreed to be part of the study, but they were vetted by the NC gr before being approved for this study. So they were very careful to choose, you know, good astrologers. Good still.
Kyle Pierce 27:05
You know, the subjective thing. I mean, this is yeah, what is the job of an astrologer to what, you know,
Tristan Paylor 27:11
well, you know, in this in this case, it's assessing personality, which all of these astrologers claim astrologer. Yeah. And they're all people who within you know, like, at, at some point, you have to be able to have something of a centralized body that agrees on certain criteria for things and you know, the NC gr is one of the astrology communities that does attempt to do that, right. Like, astrology is kind of the Wild West, like, we don't have licensing or anything like that we don't have to adhere to specific standards in order to practice. And there's a small handful of organizations that are attempting to address that and the NC gr is one of them. So, you know, if, if you are talking about you know, good astrologers are ones that are well respected by the community who are, you know, published and all that kind of stuff, you know, like, at some point, you do need to be able to make a distinction. Otherwise, astrology is a total shit show. Yeah. Like, it's just, if you can never make a meaningful distinction between who is a good reputable astrologer and who isn't, then
Kyle Pierce 28:24
well, I wouldn't argue with anybody that said that astrology is a bit of a shit show.
Tristan Paylor 28:33
It's a bit of a circuit and
Kyle Pierce 28:36
a lot of that's okay. But anyway, go on.
Tristan Paylor 28:41
Anyway, I won't go, you know, too heavily into that. But there are there are a ton of studies there's Jeffrey Dean is scientist and actually a former astrologer who worked with a psychologist named Ivan Kelly. They conducted a number of tests, which, you know, I'll include links to all of these so that, you know, people can look at them for themselves and research them for themselves. But all of their research also found that when it came to determining personality traits, cognitive or behavioral variables, astrologers not only didn't perform any better than chance, but in one of the tests, the astrologers actually performed worse than chance. And there was one study where the astrologers in the study made decisions about a person based off of their age or their birth chart, and they were better they were more accurate in their decisions when they based it off the person's age than off of their birth chart data. So there's there really isn't a ton of scientific support to suggest that Astrology can accurately do you predict personality, or cognitive abilities or human behavior or anything like that, and there's a massive corpus of research that indicates that astrology doesn't do better than chance at at this, which, for me is not a problem, because I don't know, my and I also think, you know, it's, it's important to recognize that like, most astrologers are not doing, you know, statistical research or whatever most of us are doing consulting, which is a very unscientific practice, I think, you know, maybe even if you do have a scientific background, you know, you're not really when you're sitting, you know, in a therapy session, you might be basing what you're doing off of scientific principles, but in that room, you're not doing science, you're doing therapy. So, you know, like, as a consulting astrologer, I don't see myself as doing science, when I'm sitting and reading somebody's birth chart, you know, I see myself as entertaining and counseling and you know, helping people tell their stories using this language. But, you know, if I was the kind of person who was trying to predict somebody's behavior, based on the evidence we have, you know, I would probably choose like the California Personality Inventory, which was used in Shan Carlson study, actually does have some predictive validity for determining how people do in college, for example, is one of the things that it correlates strongly with. So it's like, if I wanted to know somebody was going to do in college, I'd probably pick a Personality Inventory that's been well studied and has, you know, some scientific validity. But, you know, if I want to do something that's going to help me think creatively and engage me spiritually, I'm probably gonna do astrology.
Kyle Pierce 31:56
I don't know if I mean, I don't think I necessarily tend to approach astrology from the perspective of describing somebody's personality so much. I think I tend to think about it more in terms of maybe experience, which I mean, obviously, there's a huge intersection. I think maybe one of the big shifts for me was looking at a chart and seeing it describing your life in some sense. Which I don't think that that's always really been, at least maybe not in more recent, like the last century or so of astrology, it's probably been more and more personality has been way more emphasized. than it was historically.
Tristan Paylor 32:55
Yeah, and that's, that's an important distinction. I
Kyle Pierce 32:58
mean, Astrology can totally, you know, think it's a great tool for like you said, Tristan, like, you're engaging with it creatively. Because at the end of the day, even if you could prove that, you know, astrology is a exact roadmap of your personality, you want to be able to engage with your personality, right? You want to be able to, to manipulate it, work with it, you know, shape it in some way, you know, you're interacting with it. The whole idea of, of personhood, is very socially constructed. And I don't know if we are able to the degree to which we are able to quantify we measure things like that, you know, things like maybe like dopamine levels or something can like pretty strong correlations between you know, somebody's tendency towards depression, or general energy level.
Tristan Paylor 33:55
Yeah, and like personality is very tricky to begin with. That was the the trouble with the first part of Shan Carlson's test, is that, so the way that the California Personality Inventory works is that like, it's a psychologist who's giving you like asking you the questions, and they didn't show people the results. And like, being able to predict your own results on an inventory like that requires a high degree of self awareness. And people are not always necessarily that aware of their own personalities. So people were not able, people had just as much trouble picking the results of their personality inventories out as they did their birth charts. And so they kind of they scrapped that portion where it was like the results, you know, were in line with the scientific hypothesis, but because people were also not able to pick their personality in Inventory results out any better than chance either. You know, we can't really say anything conclusive, yes or no in favor of astrology, the astrological hypothesis they gave. And it's like those personality inventories can predict things about human behavior. But people can't necessarily pick their own results out of a bunch. So it's kind of, which is like, kind of weird to think about that, like, I might, you know, not have this sort of objective knowledge of myself that I think I did the likability to predict my own behavior, let alone somebody else's behavior,
Kyle Pierce 35:38
I think that can be a big factor. And one of the issues, difficulties in using astrology to measure personality is that, you know, what is somebody's objective personality, like, you know, a person has, you know, this, they see themselves in this framing, or whatever that, you know, in this context, the we're kind of always the hero in our own story, or at least, healthy psychology usually involves you being some degree, the hero in your own story, you know? Which isn't always true, you know, not always, you know, we do we do stuff that, you know, sometimes we're the hero, sometimes we're the villain in our own story. And often, more often than not, we're both. And it's hard to see those kinds of things. And actually, I think astrology, even as just like a reflective tool, it can be very useful to be seeing, things like that seeing stuff that you maybe wouldn't want to accept. But then also, like you said, to because of, you know, the fact that, you know, your people who already know about the sun sign on, they identify with that, and they take on those traits to some degree. So, that stuff gets very, very fuzzy and hard to, to science.
Tristan Paylor 37:13
Yeah, and I don't, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. I mean, it, you know, depends what kind of astrology you're drawing from. And you know, what, you're sort of how it's affecting your self concept. But, like, our concepts of ourselves, are socially shaped. They're very much shaped by our culture, and the people that were around and the, you know, the message of the expectations that are made of us and the messages that, you know, we receive from the world around us, like we're very malleable that way. I just, I don't necessarily think it's bad if you know, astrology is one of those sort of social and cultural phenomena that shapes your self concept. You know, as long as you're not letting it limit you. Yeah. Like, if, if you look at your chart, and you're like, Oh, well, I have Venus in the 12th house. And my number one passion in life is art. But my chart says that, you know, well, you can't be much of an artist because you know, Venus is in this idle place, or whatever. Like, don't do that. Oh, yeah.
38:18
I think um,
Tristan Paylor 38:19
but if you look at you look at astrology, and you're like, you look at your, your moon sign, and you're like, oh, you know, I really liked this quality, and I want to emulate it more. And that's an important part of my self concept. And like, that's not necessarily any worse than any of the other sources. You're taking your self concept from.
Kyle Pierce 38:34
Yeah. Well, I think just another quick point to make too about, you know, things like we see the California inventory. Scope.
Tristan Paylor 38:44
Yeah, the California personality. Yeah, Tori. I'm sure there have been, you know, updates, since that was a 1985.
Kyle Pierce 38:51
Yeah, well, tell us like that, you know, they are all very, not only culturally biased or institutionally biased to think of like, most obvious examples, IQ tests, where we attempt to measure intelligence in, you know, we want to assign a number to it to quantitatively measuring intelligence. And those tests are known to be extremely, culturally, institutionally biased, because, you know, what, what are we basing our standards of intelligence on, you know, what qualities? Are we assigning to intelligence, there's a lot to intelligence that very hard to quantify, you know, it's very good at measuring, you know, what it measures but there is, you know, it can only there's definitely limits to what you can quantitatively measure. And they kind of have to do with, you know, maybe the priorities of your culture or you know, the institution designing that test. Or you know, what Why'd colleges are looking for you know, at any given time?
Tristan Paylor 40:05
Yeah, that's the thing like a quality like intelligence is very value based. You know, there's, we inherently think that there's some degree. Yeah, personality inventories, like psychological personality inventories, do try to take these things into account. Like one of the things that they take into account is cultural bias. And like I was reading a bit about the the Calico says my internet connection is unstable. I don't know if it's affecting you.
Kyle Pierce 40:40
Last year for Yeah, you got like waist low motion.
Tristan Paylor 40:44
Looks like yeah, it said I was unstable. Good now, I'm gonna I'm gonna take this opportunity to let my cat out briefly
Kyle Pierce 41:08
hello I have a lot of Taurus placements, and I carry a really soft pillow around my home. I like touch it. I love that I like to touch. I like to touch soft things, you know? And that's only because I'm a tourist now let's. But it is inordinately it is emphasized with me, I don't really know any other people that habitually touch. Like the scenes of soft T shirts.
Tristan Paylor 41:43
I do that and I run my fingers through them so that I can feel the fabric. Yeah, it's like it's a comfort thing. So we have to really Yeah, it's it's self soothing. We have really soft curtains in our living room. And I regularly go up and I just like run the, like omega a wrinkle and run my fingers through it. Because I like to touch the soft fabric.
42:10
We do have similar charts.
Tristan Paylor 42:12
We do we do? And it's like it's
Kyle Pierce 42:16
but yeah, there is a danger egg. Only like, Oh, I'm totally guilty of that of like, Oh, here's the quality, I want to find that in the chart, you know. But those are the kinds of things that are very hard to replicate. You know, the same thing that maybe describes that and like my chart might describe that in somebody else's chart very differently. You know?
Tristan Paylor 42:44
I think that's, it's something that makes astrology unscientific, but also makes it like an incredibly useful creative tool. Because you can see, I mean, it's like, we were talking on an earlier episode about you, you said this, actually, you were talking about how, you know, when you were doing more modern astrology, you could see certain traits of yours playing out in that chart with you know, using like a placidus house system and emphasizing the outer planets and stuff like that. And then you could see the same stuff playing out but using a different set of symbols, you know, looking at your whole sign chart through a more traditional lens. And I'm like, that's the, that's kind of the beauty of it is that like, different sets of symbols can result in kind of similar interpretations. Like you can get to the same place through different pathways.
Kyle Pierce 43:46
Yeah, totally. And I think that, what makes Well, I want to make one concession first, is that most of the practice of astrology is not scientific at all. It's very unscientific, and that's okay. You know, I don't think that science has the authority on truth, or there's a whole, you know, realm of human experience that has nothing to do with truth, but also that you would be would be just completely it would be so impossible to measure in any sort of, you know, there may be I think a cause might seem off track, but there's a point an idea that always freaked me out, even as a kid, like getting into the idea of just computers and programming and stuff, is this idea that you know, at while it might be like impossible To compute using, you know, human computers that you could essentially distill reality down to a bunch of infinitely, you know, complex mathematical equations, which would indicate, you know, a single sort of trajectory that there isn't actually, you know, any sort of freewill involved. Right. I think that part of being human, whether we I mean, we, I guess it'd be very hard to prove freewill. But I think part of most humans, or at least maybe in Western society, is this belief that there is an experience of reality that is not quantifiable. That, you know, free will, I think would be by its very nature, not science. So I mean, I think that there is a level I think maybe where I differ with maybe you slightly Tristan, is that I do think that there is that but not that astrology describes a verifiable phenomenon. And what that is exactly is not. It's not really understood yet. I think astrology is kind of the art of trying to figure that out. But it can intersect with science.
Tristan Paylor 46:34
We might not be asking the right questions, because one of the things because that that's when you know, good science relies or, you know, any sort of good study of any phenomenon relies on asking good questions, or, no, you don't want to give it a value judgment, but like asking, asking the right questions. And this was something, this was a train of thought that there's an episode of the astrology podcast, where they actually talk about like, skeptics, criticisms of astrology, or it's, I think it's Chris Brennan interviewing Sam Reynolds. And they sort of the end of the episode they talk about, you know, if you if you do find statistical correlations between, you know, planetary placements, or alignments and certain things, how would that change the way you actually do astrology? Because, you know, maybe there are correlations of some kind, but they're not the correlations that we're actually looking for, like, maybe, maybe they're not correlated with personality traits, maybe they're not correlated with our economy, and its ups and downs, maybe they're correlated with something that we're just not looking for. Or, or there are correlations, but astrologers have the wrong ones, you know, so and then. So if you were if if you were able to demonstrate some sort of verifiable phenomenon where the movements and positions of the planets correlate meaningfully with stuff on Earth, and you were to do astrology, you know, from a scientific point of view, you'd probably do astrology completely differently from how we do astrology. Well, and are like, would we be prepared to completely throw out our, you know, 2000 years worth of astrology texts and completely rewrite everything? Yeah.
Kyle Pierce 48:31
Yeah, I mean, that's a that's exactly. One thing that occurred to me when you were talking about the study where they did the California inventory, Personality Inventory. And it occurred to me is, you're granted like this astrologers picked it, but it when you're talking about like languages, right, are, you know, there's some we definitely both agree that, that astrology is a symbolic language, you know. And whenever we're interpreting that language as astrologers were interpreting it through our lens of reality using us another set of symbols, you know, our English language, in our case, which has all sorts of value judgments and attachments. run into, you know, the fundamental issue of just to humans engaging with each other is that one person might be saying these words and you know, maybe the other person will resonate, you know, 90% understanding or something that maybe you can try to quantify if you wanted to, but people misunderstand each other all the time or functionally misunderstand each other or, you know, maybe just take things differently than they're intended. And, you know, we're sort of limited by by our own ability to convey thoughts and ideas in, in symbolic form, because that's the only way we know how to construct meaningful thought or conveyable. Thought is through symbols. And I think that that is maybe what pulls me towards astrology is that it? To me, it suggests that like, oh, humans, you like to try more the other way around. But from a human perspective, it's like, oh, you humans like to talk in symbols, right? You like to think in symbols, you like symbols? It's how you experience reality, we do that to, says the cosmos, you know. And I think that one thing that maybe astrologers can tend to agree on is like, and it's often very vague, it's like you see something in a chart, like, Adolf Hitler's chart, you know, I've listened to and seen a ton of different interpretations of Adolf Hitler's chart. But it's like one of the most famous birth charts in the world. And that's because me, you want to see this guy's birth chart, but like, it's there is something very distinct about that birth chart that reeks of something, you know, that like this, there's, there's an uncanny? Like, how could the symbolism in this chart, you know, line up so well with person's life? Like, it could be it could be describing other things, but I'm finding that language is failing me right now. But and I think that, you know, astrology, you know, for all of its non science, it's a wonderful language for communicating things like that. Try not to get on a tangent about Hitler's birth chart, because I've been studying. I could go on, but I know, it was kind of want to segue into my little research project, unless you want to say, and the vein of what we were just talking about.
Tristan Paylor 52:10
I mean, I have I have tons to say, but I am very curious about your project. I really want to hear I actually before, before you get into that, I think there's, there's, there's a one thing that I wanted to add that I thought was interesting, I have run into an argument that astrology has been ruined by modern psychology. And that if we were to just go back to the ancient roots of astrology, that it would once more be accurate. So there's, there's an article about this, written by someone who is very interested in like Project hindsight, and the revival of Hellenistic astrology. And their take is that, you know, the reason that astrology doesn't hold up and all these scientific studies is that people are using modern psychological astrology. And if they were using the Hellenistic techniques, it might hold up. I mean, as far as I know, you know, a group of immune, it would be interesting, if you were able to get a group of astrologers from one specific tradition together. I don't I mean, I don't even know if you'd be able to get a sample large enough as the problem well, even with that, and you'd have to get them all to agree. Yeah. Within that tradition, you'd still have to get them to agree on which techniques they think are accurate, and good luck getting any two astrologers to agree on anything. But you know, if you were like, in theory able to do that, if you were able to get enough, like Hellenistic astrologers to be like, what's that? Yeah, it'd be like this. This is the set of techniques that we're testing. And these are the things that these techniques are capable of predicting. It would be interesting to design a study to see, you know, maybe there's a point to that. But until there's a study, we can't we can't know whether that's just an opinion, or whether there might be something do.
Kyle Pierce 54:05
Yeah. I mean, you and I agree. Very similar perspective on astrology overall, you know, we would maybe interpret certain things very similarly. But obviously, not 100% of that, you know, we're, we're going to differ and I think that you that yeah, it would be impossible to find two astrologers that match perfectly.
Tristan Paylor 54:29
Yeah. I feel like you and I are also unusual in that like, I don't know, I am always very open to your ideas. I don't think I've ever disagreed with you on anything about astrology.
Kyle Pierce 54:44
We're both so skeptical people. And in fact, I might what sucked me into astrology is that I wanted to disprove it. I wanted to say no, this there's no way that this is describing something that resonates so much should look like, this has to be an accident, this must be a coincidence. And, you know, the further I got into it, the further you know, I think that's what it's pretty difficult about astrology is that you generally learn astrology by basically accumulating anecdotal evidence. It's a huge accumulation of anecdotal evidence. And, you know, people influence the way you think we influenced the way each other thinks. It's not how I wanted to work that but groupthink is a thing, but
Tristan Paylor 55:41
I understand what you're saying. Yeah.
Kyle Pierce 55:46
So I mean, again, like I'm going in circles a little, but yet we keep running into the unknown there. Astrology is such like a diverse tool, that it's like, it doesn't have to be scientific, to be useful. But I think there is something about astrology that is describing something in a consistent way that we are always interacting with and engaging with, and maybe reflecting off of. And, again, you're going to get a million different perspectives on what astrology is, and I'm, you know, both of us are always in the process of figuring that out. But I think it maybe says something about why things in, you know, birth chart can play out and so dynamically in so many different ways. Because, you know, the way you interact with whatever is consistent about the phenomenon of astrology is going to be highly variable, depending on, you know, a bajillion other factors because astrology, you know, I don't think it can be used for everything, which is maybe where it gets, but the same time it can, because the symbolism so broad, I don't know, it's such a fuzzy, weird thing.
Tristan Paylor 57:23
Well, it's like it can be used to interpret everything, but it can't necessarily be used to diagnose or predict. Yeah, I
Kyle Pierce 57:30
think the predictive capability of astrology is, is limited. For sure, like, if they're very limited.
Tristan Paylor 57:38
Yeah, like, if, if I have a cough, I am not going to look at my transits to figure out what's going on, I'm going to go to a doctor. But, you know, if I'm thinking about how that cough, and how that experience of going to the doctor affected me, and how that fits into the narrative of my life, then I'm probably going to look at my transits. And those give me you know, symbols and stories to work with, to figure out like, what does that experience mean to me? And how does that potentially fit into these larger patterns of meaning in my life? I think like, I definitely notice a tendency in the astrology community to want to demonstrate that astrology is a science or that it is using a scientific method to arrive at its conclusions, because there's this idea that like, something has to be science in order to be like, useful or good or worth, like, valuable in some way. And I think like, you know, when we hear things like, you know, something is the result of human imagination, we often use the word just in there, like, you know, it's, it's just in your imagination, or it's, you know, it's just human created as if it isn't, like, absolutely incredible that human beings are able to imagine things like this. Like, I think human imagination is incredible. And our ability to match the patterns in our own lives with the larger Cosmos using our imaginations, is like, that's amazing. I think that's very valuable in its own way. And that it's not a slate to say that something is the result of human imagination, if anything, it's a compliment. It's a compliment to our, you know, a creative abilities, it's a complement to our ability to, you know, create our own narratives and create our own meaning. Like, that's all that's all astounding, you know, if every if, if only science was useful, then like, we wouldn't have art and music and all of these wonderful things that are really about like communicating something of the human experience of meaning. And you know, finding patterns that aren't necessarily you know, statistical patterns but which Are patterns of meaning? Yeah, like I, you know, I, I did. My first foray into school is visual art. And all I was doing was pattern matching. Like I was using that function of my mind to create art that communicated something that was meaningful to people. And I feel like I do something very similar when I practice astrology.
Kyle Pierce 1:00:17
One, I mean, experiencing reality isn't is an art. I mean, your brain is yes, it's one that we engage with, collectively and individually. And it's like, I mean, it's like the fantasy that we all agree on, you know, whatever is going on at any given time, like, we only have a government because we all agree that there's a government.
Tristan Paylor 1:00:40
Yeah, it's totally Yeah, like, there's no sort of physical thing that's like, it's like velvet ropes. You know, like velvet ropes are only a symbol, they're not stopping you from doing anything. They're purely symbolic. It's just a way of communicating a boundary. And we adhere to that boundary. Because we've all in this imaginative way agreed that it exists and that there are good reasons Yeah, to
Kyle Pierce 1:01:04
I mean, you get like, like matter, you know, the basic building block of matter is an atom and an atom is almost entirely nothing, except for the tiny little bits of it that are, you know, identifiably matter. And that is even actually, like things like quantum physics are dipping out of the realm of hard science. That's it. My notes are never going to be as organized as Kristen's gonna refer to something that like, like, oh, yeah, I read this thing somewhere, once you know, but I believe, yeah, if we're going by like, sort of definition of a hard science, science is a tool that we use to, to figure out reality, and figure out, you know, what is hard and unstable about reality, but so much of reality is our experience of it. And, you know, I think what can be fun about some of the real heavy duty sciences, that, like quantum physics and stuff that are getting into highly theoretical territory, is that it's like, kind of trying to find that intersection between the study of both reproducible physical, natural world and, you know, the subjective, you know, human brains interpretation of it, and how those two things intersect. In a lot of that, we haven't figured out how to measure yet. You don't really know what what reality is, you know, string theory and stuff that tries to, to explain that and particle physics like we don't, we don't know what, you know, the subatomic particles, they seem to disappear and reappear all the time.
Tristan Paylor 1:03:00
Yeah, there's like, way more we don't know about physics and that theories of physics stand because they're able to reliably make predictions, but we don't necessarily understand how it all works. We know enough to be able to make predictions about stuff. But yeah, that's as far as it goes.
Kyle Pierce 1:03:20
Yeah. So I mean, we've talked a lot about, you know, what, the degree to which astrology needs to be science, you know. But I do want to make a couple, maybe cases, I don't know, maybe start by asking, oh, maybe not, that sounds a little too challenging. Like something like sociology, right? Which is considered a science. It's considered a soft science. Because we do have like kind of varying levels of science. What would you maybe say, separates astrology from something like sociology
Tristan Paylor 1:04:06
the ability of sociology to actually make predictions about things or psychology, you know, the ability of psychology to diagnose and treat mental illness. The I mean, another thing too, that I would say distinguishes social sciences from astrology is, you know, their theories within the social sciences are still part of that sort of self correcting skeptical process. You evaluate an idea with observation and analysis, and put it to the test. And if the data supports your predictions, then great if the Predictions Fail, you throw it the theory, like any anytime you start from a place of, of skepticism and willingness Um, to be surprised by the results or to be proven wrong, which I don't you know, like, at least in my practice, like, that's not that's certainly not the place I'm starting from. I'm starting from a place of, you know, how can I use this language to help somebody illustrate things in their lives in a meaningful way? How can I be helpful to someone, I'm not sort of starting out with a premise and then setting out to disprove that premise. And, you know, another factor is that research, scientific research needs to be submitted to a scientific journal, it needs to be peer reviewed, by experts, qualified experts in that field and astrology doesn't have, like, there are astrology research journals. But I mean, I wouldn't necessarily say that they are science journals. I think like if, if you're trying to demonstrate, you know, that Astrology can say predict something about personality, you need to submit that to his psychology journal to have it peer. Yeah, not in astrology journal, because you're making a prediction about psychology. And you know, that that level of refereeing, I don't think is part of like most of our practices of astrology. And, you know, I haven't seen you know, astrologers published research in scientific journals. And I do think that is important for eliminating bias and ensuring that like, methodology and experimentation is correct, you need a community of accredited people who are able to, you know, make sure that you've crossed all your T's and dotted all your I's, and that your interpretation of the results is actually accurate.
Kyle Pierce 1:06:58
Astrology doesn't have we don't even necessarily have a concrete system for what accuracy is, you know,
Tristan Paylor 1:07:07
we don't agree on ever, like, you know, chemists agree, like every chemist agrees that the chemical composition of water is, you know, hydrogen and oxygen, like, that's not debatable. And I mean, that is where social science starts get fuzzier, because it is harder to define things. But even in, I was just flipping through my, I've just started an undergraduate degree in psychology. And so I was flipping through my, my psych textbook in preparation for this.
Kyle Pierce 1:07:40
And I have a bunch of those. And by now, like, that was only maybe
Tristan Paylor 1:07:46
I know, they, they up, I mean, it's good. They update quickly, I guess, but also, anyway. One of the features of research in psychology is making sure that to quote my textbook, research is reported with precise, measurable and operational definitions of research procedures and concepts. So for example, if you're conducting a study about sleep deprivation, you need to define sleep deprived very clearly, and very specifically. So for a study, sleep deprived may be defined as at least two hours less than a person's natural sleep, or a trait like aggression, your aggression could mean a whole bunch of things. So you have to narrow it down. So it might be you're actually studying how many pins somebody stabs into a doll that represents their lab partner. That's really what they're measuring. And they're using the word aggression to describe what they're measuring. In astrology, like we don't we don't even agree on what the signs fundamentally mean, or what the house is fundamentally. Yeah, right.
Kyle Pierce 1:08:55
Yeah. Some things I want to say about that. I don't know, I guess, he will gets tricky is that, you know, while sociology, you know, relies very heavily on statistics, and you can find statistical correlations between, you know, income level, and your income later on in life, you know, like, what you're born into the sort of material circumstances that you're born into, have a very heavy influence on your life going forward, naturally, right. Sociology, you know, tries to identify and describe, you know, what those things are? And I don't know, I guess, in this is what makes it really hard to study it is. I can't really explain my experience as an astrologer of, you know, looking at a chart of somebody that I don't really know anything about, and being able to identify something like Oh, You know, you have issues with relation. That's, that's most people, but he didn't get any, like more specific than that, like, I don't know, like, I don't know, like one of the broad things that be like Hellenistic astrology can point to. But I mean, there's obviously a lot of different factors involved is maybe what the more difficult areas of your life are, what the maybe easier and more difficult areas of your life are. In that when I get something right, which I often do, I don't know, I'm like, I don't know, I can't like I don't feel like I'm able to take credit for it. Because I don't think it's me, you know? It's like, I'm just reading the astrology and I don't know, like, there's a and that's what is both what keeps Astrology of live but it's also problematic to some degree is that confirmation bias or you know, your subjective experience of truth, especially when it gets reinforced over and over again. It's really hard to divorce yourself from I don't know, I'm thinking about like the Galka when
Tristan Paylor 1:11:07
I go honest, my French accent is terrible. I apologize. It was an attempt to speak speaking listeners Gauquelin Gauquelin
Kyle Pierce 1:11:21
eaten a quesadilla Gauquelin like a French psychologist,
Tristan Paylor 1:11:28
to see a psychologist so that he was just started not like just a statistician as if that's like, a primarily
Kyle Pierce 1:11:33
a psychologist. I think that's what's definitely studied. I think he's using statistics to you know, psychological research and sociological research you do. That kind of researches what a surveying.
Tristan Paylor 1:11:47
Oh, yeah. And he, French psychologist and writer.
Kyle Pierce 1:11:52
And, and he did like a series of experiments on astrology. And a lot of them, you know, kind of similar to like what you described with? Who was it the the experiments in the 80s? Sorry.
Tristan Paylor 1:12:10
John Carlson. And then I also mentioned a recent round from the 2000s. With your results.
Kyle Pierce 1:12:18
I think he was pretty mean, he wasn't necessarily I think he was more trying to I mean, he was trying to disprove astrology for the most part. And he did like several experiments one where he just took like a single horoscope. Think he like made up a birthday. And he put out a like a newspaper, an ad for you know, people do a free you know, astrology readings. And he sent back, you know, the same research to everybody or the same mom horoscope to everybody, like, sent back the the same description and everything. Mostly personality description, and 94% of people agreed with it or, you know, reacted positively to it. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, totally. You're a bunch of like that. But then his Mars effects study. It's like, he was like, kind of a surprise to him. He was really not expecting there to be a correspondence. And I think it became problematic in multiple ways, because it kind of contradicted a lot of thinking around among astrologers, as well as the science scientists, like it was like.
Tristan Paylor 1:13:28
Yeah, like what I was talking about earlier, where like, if there is some, you know, scientific correlate, like a correlation that can be scientifically demonstrated, is it one that astrologers would even agree on or want to use? Or would it contradict everything? Well, yeah, that you know, as popularly interpreted
Kyle Pierce 1:13:44
Well, unfortunately, I don't think it's data exists anymore.
Tristan Paylor 1:13:48
I think I think it does,
Kyle Pierce 1:13:49
I don't think it's well, the data was reproduced. Yeah, I don't think it's like original data exists, like, the birth times and everything. Oh, the actual charts, and was using plus Sidious. Which, you know, I bias towards it is that, you know, yeah, you would, I don't know, maybe get things because you weren't using the objectively true sign house system. But essentially, the reproductions of that research were rife with issues one of them. Allegedly, I've seen it repeated over and over again. Granted, that thing is that, you know, institutionally the scientific community is really has vested interest in not confirming an astrology and I guess, you know, there's been very mixed results in replicating that research, you know, why have astrologers found, tend to do be able to reproduce, you know, the same result That's because at least one the star baby scandal,
Tristan Paylor 1:15:05
the star baby scandal,
Kyle Pierce 1:15:08
the committee for the scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal began a project to specifically refute Gotlands data on the Mars effect. And apparently, you know, they replicated the results, but they falsified the results, I haven't been able to find, you know, really definitive proof of that. So haven't done like a ton of extensive research. But I mean, you do just run into an issue of bias, which, during my experiment, I had to kind of confront with myself as well.
Tristan Paylor 1:15:46
I would really like to do more research on go glands work because the whole situation sounds, I mean, I'm not a statistician. So, you know, when I read, like, there are statisticians who have criticisms of his work, which are probably, you know, very good criticisms, but I don't understand statistics. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to take stats, so I'm, I'm thinking, that's, that's gonna be fun for me as an astrologer to apply what I'm learning to astrology, and maybe do a little bit more of a deep dive into the controversy around Goku lands work and the various criticisms of it by other statisticians to, you know, once I start to understand the lay of the land a little bit better, hopefully, presuming I am able to understand it, then. Yeah. You know, I might be able to have an opinion on it. But as it stands, I am not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion on the Mars. Yeah.
Kyle Pierce 1:16:44
I mean, I think what, you know, he, that particular research project was a better fit. I don't want to just be like, simpler. I think some of these get a little too complicated. I think a lot of the like, even just the, you know, have a bunch of astrologers pick a, you know, an accepted Personality Inventory, and handle a bunch of charts and, you know, have the match, you know, charts to people using the internet that sounds freaking complicated. Like, like, there's got to be simpler approach, and I think the Mars effect. Want to know about it? simpler. It's like, okay, where's Maurice? At
Tristan Paylor 1:17:31
least like? Yeah, like, success is an easier thing to measure than personality traits. Also, yeah. It's just like you're trying to figure out like, are more famous athletes born under certain configurations? is a little easier.
Kyle Pierce 1:17:48
I think what he found was that the, the, kind of beyond the, the Mars effects study was that just people who have certain planets more prominent tended to gravitate towards more careers, you know, from a statistical standpoint? And I think that is maybe where I've, I'm like, Yeah, of course, I don't know, like that. It's not going to, like, you know, if you grew up poor, are you guaranteed to be poor? No, but you get a bad start, you know, your, your chances of overcoming, you know, the sort of set of obstacles, you know, that are just kind of built into your life, because of the circumstances of your birth. They're gonna be hard to overcome, you know, your, your path to riches is going to be harder. And, but it's not going to guarantee that you, you can't overcome that. And I guess I think that, you know, that I think is a provable phenomenon with astrology. And so that was the hypothesis that I went into my Mars experiment with,
Tristan Paylor 1:18:56
I am ready to hear the results of your research you
Kyle Pierce 1:18:59
excited? Alright, so, my, my data just getting started with this, I think that's maybe one thing to bear in mind is that, you know, this started as like, you know, a simple experiment, really, to see if, you know, I could find a simple way to test the test astrology a little bit. And, well, what the, you know, the data speak for itself. But so what I did is, I wanted to address you know, some of the main points of, you know, the definition of science, right. So, just because I have to pick one, I'm going to pick real clear sciences, very hard definition of science, which, you know, actually is probably not the best choice because they would not categorize anything that is using statistics as being science. But I think They also recognize a softer level of science. But you know, you think you also mentioned earlier clearly defined terminology. Right? And while um, that can be tricky with astrology overall in certain areas, I think I want to find something very simple. And Mars. I don't think you can really find any sort of astrological tents text that don't tie Mars to fighting. Right?
Tristan Paylor 1:20:31
Yeah, there's some things that I think we do pretty universally agree on, it'd be pretty controversial for someone to be like, actually, Mars is about, like flowers and peace and like never yelling or picking up a weapon ever. Mars is definitely about fighting,
Kyle Pierce 1:20:48
fighting, fighting goes to Mars for the most part. So, you know, I wanted to look at fighters. And I'm a big fan of UFC. Mixed Martial Arts. And so I wanted to see, you know, one of the thing that I started to, my brain started to go round and round with was that, you know, there's so many other mitigating conditions for from ours, you know, it's not all about, you know, just what sign it's in, you know, there's angularity, there's reception, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, let's just see, if things I couldn't test for angularity I can only test for I think I only got two actual birth times. Out of the 70 charts that I compiled, so quantifiable, you know, we can't really you know, give it a numbers but we can say, you know, at least by the tropical zodiac, we can say whether or not Mars is in a given sign using mathematical measurements, right? And at least you know, for most of astrology history, the domiciles of Mars are Aries and Scorpio. These are signs that Mars to rule or, you know, minimum are set to be stronger. It's the most, you know, Mars and Aries and Mars and Scorpio are very Mars like, right? Mars is able to do its thing. And Capricorn is the sign of Mars is exultation. So my hypothesis for this was that among top ranked UFC martial arts fighters, instances in which Mars is in one of its traditional domiciles, Aries or Scorpio, or exultation, Capricorn, will be represented in higher proportion than the statistical average of approximately 25%. I know that that's not a perfect number, but it's pretty close. I think that the most common Mars sign by a very small margin, just because of the nature of Mars is eccentric orbit is Virgo, just spends a little bit more time on average in Virgo. And I think the least common which will please all the Mars in Aquarius is out there is Mars and Aquarius.
Tristan Paylor 1:23:13
Does this. Does this also take into account the variable of when people are likely to be born during the year? Is there any like, as far as more or less likely to be in certain signs at certain times of the year because people are more likely to be burned born at certain times and you certain seasons?
Kyle Pierce 1:23:32
No, I'm actually that is maybe the nice thing about Mars, though, is that it's in its orbit. It's so eccentric, that unlike most of the other planets, you really is probably the most chaotic like it could be anywhere at any time of year. Nice. We'll go like long periods of time without a retrograde in Aquarius, for example. But that is not a permanent state, you know, we might get a bunch, you know, over the course of a couple decades or something. So while you know I didn't have the time, or the patience yet, at least to to create an actual control group will use you know, 25% I think is fair using three signs, and three being 25% of 12. But yeah, well used to just math is our placeholder for control group. So for my experimental group is prominent. You've seen mixed martial arts fighters tried to keep it consistent. It did the current champion, as well as the top five ranked fighters in each weight class for both men and women. So that's six fighters from each division in the UFC. And you know, going by that I did end up with 70 in total 51 Male fighters 19 female fighters irrelevant. You may or may not be. So, of the seven D fighters, total 15 had Mars in either Aries or Scorpio, which would be 21% 21.43% had Mars in the in domicile and under Aries or Scorpio, you will be statistical average would be 16.66%. Right. So, by math, these fighters, on average had 12.63% more likely to have Mars in either Aries or Scorpio than any other sign. exultation I got nine. So nine, with Mars and Capricorn, which is 12.86% just a slightly larger margin than the control actually much larger control the 8.33%. And so, these fighters were 52 point 58% more likely to have Mars in Capricorn, then any other sign. So and then between the two, we had 24 out of 70. So 34.29% of fighters had Mars and either Aries Scorpio or Capricorn. Which statistically it should be about 25%. So that is 9.29% more than statistical average. Or, you know, 37% more likely to have Mars in dignity of some kind mean I didn't even get into like triplicity and term and stuff, which is an option. That'll be fun to play with. Some pretty significant difference there right now compiled some data for detriment. And 11 fighters had Mars in either Libra or Taurus, which is 15% and so slightly below the statistical statistical average of 16.66%. So I guess about 5% less likely to have Mars and Venus ruled sign if you are a top ranked UFC fighter. Now this is where I got really interesting to me, is that when you looked at Mars in its fall in cancer 10 out of 70 fighters had Mars in Cancer. So Mars, in its fall, was more common than Mars than any other sign amongst these 70, top ranked mixed martial artists. With about 14.29%, about a 71% 71% more than the statistical average. That wouldn't be right.
Tristan Paylor 1:27:55
That I don't know it makes sense to me. For what,
Kyle Pierce 1:28:02
that was interesting to me. Granted, you know, just from my anecdotal experience, you know, Mars and cancer might kick your ass. They can Brawl actually, my my girlfriend in high school, Marcin cancer, and she did hit me a couple times, but she also fought a lot of other girls shoots feisty.
Tristan Paylor 1:28:26
Mars and cancer has a reason to fight. Something to defend. Yeah, well, and it's like planets and fall, you're kind of at the bottom of the heap. So you know, if you're at the bottom of the heap, you got to fight your way out from underneath it,
Kyle Pierce 1:28:41
but they're also at the top of this heap of fighters aren't interesting. Now, you know, sometimes there can be a feeling like, needing to prove oneself, I think with the fall in general, but I think particularly Mars and cancer. I always think of that movie, Mr. Nanny, and while I haven't seen that movie since it came out, and when I was probably like, five Thank you know, Hulk Hogan, wearing a two two will be like, maybe be extra inclined to prove that that Hulk Hogan can kick some ass. Now that you know maybe wouldn't correspond with like, traditional notions of Mars and cancer. Which I find extra interesting and actually it kind of goes with my personal theories of planets and fall is that they're better as
Tristan Paylor 1:29:39
well. I always feel like they're they tend towards extremes
Kyle Pierce 1:29:44
they tend towards extremes Absolutely. But you know, this beat UFC overall being a probably a pretty constructive channel for for if you want to fight people, you know, get paid for it. For fighting other people who want to fight to you know, one thing I found interest think though, is that overall? No, there weren't enough female fighters really, because it did notice a trend that a lot more women had Mars in a Venus ruled sign or on average than than men, but also an average more Mars and cancer to which I don't quite have an interpretation for yet, but it makes sense to me on like, an intuitive level. Within like, sort of, I would say like that energy is maybe less acceptable, coming from women, socially. It's maybe like one way to interpret, you know, Mars in its detriment. Or fall. It's like, unacceptable anger. unacceptable to whom, you know.
Tristan Paylor 1:30:51
Yeah, exactly. Where, you know, if, if a male politician has a meltdown? Oh, yeah. You know, he's, everyone is, you know, like, Oh, he's demonstrating courage and standing up for his convictions, and somehow his anger is rational and justified. Whereas if it's a female politician, well, this is why women can't be in politics, because they're too. Like, it's a total. Yeah, it's a total double standard, you know, some people, their anger is rewarded when it's expressed, and some people's anger is punished or denied. And some Yeah,
Kyle Pierce 1:31:23
yeah. I mean, Hillary Clinton, you know, everybody would always talk about that. Oh, yeah. But I mean, it kind of made me happy too, because like, I don't know, if anybody out there has maybe Mars in signed it, you know, traditionally doesn't like, you know, obviously, you can still kick ass. That's not all that Mars does. And, you know, I wouldn't even just look at Mars. Mars is not the only planet that would be involved. You need a body right to fight.
Tristan Paylor 1:31:58
You need you need an ascendant,
Kyle Pierce 1:32:00
but I mean, in terms of just looking at something very simple. There was a pretty strong statistical correlation with Mars being in one of its traditional dignities. Or in its in its fall. Yeah. Which maybe might cause you know, my research not is probably not comprehensive enough to be conclusive, but might make one rethink falls a little bit. Because, you know, they're actually being held up quite high, I would say the very successful fighters. Now why these had really fascinating receptions, which I'm not going to get into receptions with other planets. Mars ruled signs, which, you know, it's really cool for astrology geeks out there, and I'll probably publish that at some point. But yes, my illusions.
Tristan Paylor 1:32:54
I expect an article Yeah, your interpretation of your data.
Kyle Pierce 1:32:59
Namely, that you know, Mars will eat your children know, Mars and cancer.
Tristan Paylor 1:33:07
Don't mess with Mars.
Kyle Pierce 1:33:10
But also, I just want to throw this in there. For fun. I thought it was interesting. If you want to know what the most common signs for Mars to be in amongst these fighters. Number one, obviously with cancer, Aries would be the second highest with nine total. Capricorn tied with nine as well. But the least likely would be. Virgo was only only three fighters, Mars and Virgo. It's only in the charts of three fighters, Mars and Sagittarius three as well. And sadly, Mars and Aquarius, the bottom three so one of my conclusions is that Tristan is about 300% likely to kick my ass in a fight.
Tristan Paylor 1:33:59
i This it? See this is where you definitely would not be able to make a prediction based on this date. Yeah, no, exactly. I've been thinking this whole time like, oh, I guess I should become an MMA fighter.
Kyle Pierce 1:34:10
I mean, your your chart, you got an exalted Mars with an exalted Saturn. And a lot of these a lot of them have Mars. Mars Saturn action going on. Makes a lot of sense, endurance, stopping power. So many fun ways that these played out to like individually. I won't get into but I think also maybe an important point is you know, we have a statistical correlation does that you know what can you say out of that conclusively that you know more Morris buy more UFC fighters, you know, in the specific specific circumstances. stance, you know, had Mars in one of these signs. But yeah, why Tristan, why aren't you UFC fighter
Tristan Paylor 1:35:01
I don't know. But this is bringing my whole life into question.
Kyle Pierce 1:35:04
Yeah, it's challenging your beliefs a little bit.
Tristan Paylor 1:35:09
My, my first astrology teacher told me that I should get into martial arts based on my chart. That was more than 10 years ago. And I still haven't taken her up on that. I mean, I think, and she said it, I don't think she said it, because she was like, Oh, you'll be talented at it, but that it would be good for me. Which I mean, I'm sure it would be good for a lot of people. But you know, maybe she
1:35:38
had a point, you have a lot of Mars stuff.
Tristan Paylor 1:35:42
There's a lot, which is funny because I'm so not that I feel like my life is very marzi but I am normally very marzi unless, you know, like, the way I tend to frame it is like, I have 100 anxiety disorders, and I still get out of bed and try every day, which means you know, the boss music is constantly playing in the background of my life, even though nothing is happening. So it feels like I'm constantly at war, even though nothing is really going on. And I keep getting out of bed and facing my fears and doing stuff anyway. Which I guess is the Mars trait. But no, I am baby. Very soft and non violence and scared of everything.
Kyle Pierce 1:36:18
I think that's how you turn around typical Myers person, I think. I think that is what is interesting about astrology, and maybe really hard to science. It is, you know, wow, you know, a bunch of what I'm about to say is built on totally anecdotal data. And that is how I will have to practice astrology. Because there is just isn't enough scientific. Lee sciency like, research out there to build a whole astrology practice on but I know from my personal experience, because I got some difficult Mars stuff is that, you know, I exercise helps me a lot. I have a punching bag. I like to punch it, and I feel way better after I do. My little offering to Mars, you know, I'll punch some stuff for you. Mars. Don't hurt me.
Tristan Paylor 1:37:11
Yeah, articles, I really hurt stuff for you. I'll give you an outlet. Yeah. Yeah, one of the one of the articles I really want to write is going to be on remediation and how I conceptualize it.
Kyle Pierce 1:37:26
Yeah. I think that this did confirm some of my beliefs about remediation, but maybe reinforced it and maybe focused that a little bit more because you know, not that everybody with Mars and cancer should be a UFC fighter. But you know, yeah, I don't know if that's using traditional texts. And, you know, just my anecdotal experience, it does seem to indicate some, you know, difficult Mars energy that needs a channel and giving it a safe healthy channels seems to be positive. You know, one thing that granted I don't have a big enough pool, but just, I can't help but want to share some a little fun stuff. There was more Mars in Libra than Mars and Scorpio. Yeah, Mars in Scorpio actually had statistically below average by a couple points. Overall, 8.57 versus
Tristan Paylor 1:38:16
Scorpio is all about it's not going to show you that they're gifted fighter. They don't want to go up on stage and be like, oh, yeah, I'm the warrior. Yeah. They're disarming. You know, Scorpio is like wearing a kill you in the Daro print dress and Yeah, exactly. It's not a fight. Somewhere that you can't see. Yeah. That's it. That's the Scorpio way.
Kyle Pierce 1:38:41
Yeah. I think I was a little disappointed with Marcin queries just a little bit. But you know, that's also
Tristan Paylor 1:38:49
well fighters need an audience. So maybe that's Mars and Aquarius. job is to watch the face and up or, you
Kyle Pierce 1:38:55
know, safe fucking show offs. Course you want to be seen crazy. I'm so bound need to be fighting to know that I can fight.
Tristan Paylor 1:39:07
I don't need all that attention to be funny.
Kyle Pierce 1:39:09
Not that I've like actively engaged in that monologue in my life, but never really had to get in fights. I only got in fights in like fifth grade, and kind of wondered why because I don't know. I feel like other people get challenged the fights. I don't get challenged the fights. And there are quite a few Mars and Leos especially at the very top ranks, like Mars and Leo is a show
Tristan Paylor 1:39:31
Interesting. Well, yeah, it's like combining the athletics of Mars with the, you know, being the center of attention and being on a stage performance aspect of actually being a pro athlete.
Kyle Pierce 1:39:47
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, I don't know, I want to I want to get the whole UFC eventually. And just, I don't know, it's really fascinating to me. Maybe I'll do a podcast one day, UFC astrology podcast. Predict?
Tristan Paylor 1:40:04
Yeah, like there's, there's an oh yeah. Predict the fights. I am well, I wish I could remember the name of the astrologer off the top of my head who's like, really like really strictly traditional and is just like, astrology is for making predictions and not for personality analysis. And he was on a show for a while predicting the outcomes of like football matches and stuff.
Kyle Pierce 1:40:31
Yeah. I mean, I especially because the UFC just came out with a betting app.
Tristan Paylor 1:40:37
Like one, you'd have to really like put it to the test, I feel like you need to control by using a non astrology method to determine your bedding and using astrology to determine your bedding and see if there's a difference. Yeah, even like, there's just so many variables, right, like, you know, and so much is up to random chance to and the fun one waiting to be trained randomness, which is, yeah, yeah. Like, do they get better or worse over the course of the competition? And, you know, how's their performance affected and all that kind of stuff,
Kyle Pierce 1:41:15
you have to pair astrology with actually observing reality? And maybe a lot of what makes astrology more powerful, or maybe more powerful than it actually is? I don't know it's hard to nail down is that it does tune your ability to observe. I think, I think that, you know, through the lens, ology you, I don't know yet you tune your observations. More I don't you learn to like refine what it is, you're you're observing, or looking for, which, you know, you could get confirmation bias and stuff. But
Tristan Paylor 1:41:49
she, well, it's, I mean, you're, you're using a lot of pattern matching, but I find I do just generally pay attention more. Because I'm interested in finding patterns. I ended up just being more observant in general. And I asked, I often ask better questions that I wouldn't think to ask. You know, like, if somebody gives me their birth chart, I'll see things in their birth chart that make me wonder stuff about their lives. And I would never have thought to ask that until I saw a particular configuration. And I asked them about it. And you know, we ended up having a two hour story, but something really significant that happened in their life. And like, you know, that's, there's, it's also been very good for my memory. Oh, yeah. I'm going through a little bit of the history of psychology in my class right now. And of course, you know, I immediately want to look up the birth charts of every significant figure. And I mean, there are a lot of obscure settings that I've never once heard. And that's it. Like, they're all. They're all these obscure names and events that like I've never heard of before, and would struggle to remember, but if I have the event chart or the birth chart, then you know, I'm not I'm not going to forget William James with his six planet Capricorn stuff. That's for
Kyle Pierce 1:43:09
sure. He didn't even talk about William James man.
Tristan Paylor 1:43:13
Well, I didn't I didn't dive into his chart well enough yet to. I literally discovered that as I was falling asleep last night, so it was not time for a deep dive into anybody's chart.
Kyle Pierce 1:43:24
I would love to just do I wish I had more time in life, just like a podcast of just like every day, you know, every episode just just dig into a chart and just dig in. Like some crazy chart like William James is just like, the most epic Capricorn stellium
Tristan Paylor 1:43:44
it would be fun to to just do episodes where it's like we focus on a particular discipline like we do the charts of UFC fighters we do the charts of famous psychologists, we do we look at the charts of marine biologists I don't know it's just like a different category. Every time and we select a couple of charts from that category and dig into them.
Kyle Pierce 1:44:08
I mean, I think that doing this little experiment is I don't know I'm, I am a little hooked. Now. I do want to do more of these experiments. I want to let you know, I think I'm gonna prove astrology with the power of science. And there's no stopping me. So sorry, Tristan. I mean, I when I'm kidding. Totally kidding.
Tristan Paylor 1:44:35
If you end up like receiving the Nobel Prize in science for demonstrating some kind of important astrological correlation that leads to an amazing discovery. I will be I will be thrilled. But I think like I think that if your love of astrology, not us specifically Kyle, but the general you if If one's love of astrology is dependent upon astrology, being a science or being a scientific pursuit, then the foundations of their love are probably on shaky ground. And that might be a, you know, I, I'm sure there are going to be people who are very angry at me for that take, but I am very pro critical thinking. And I see a lot of really dangerous and questionable stuff happening when people do not think critically about their astrology practice. And I really want to point out critical thinking. And, and realistically assessing, you know, what, what is the foundation of what I'm doing? And what am I doing it for? Like, what am I doing astrology for? Why is it useful to me? And, you know, how, what are the ways in which that actually works?
Kyle Pierce 1:45:54
I'm saying I mean, I absolutely agree with you. But I mean, I think from that comes just a need to, I really want to know what it is, it actually does do. I don't think it does everything.
Tristan Paylor 1:46:08
Well, and I'm quite content that, you know, I'm pretty sure that astrology is mostly based on our ability to pattern match, which is we are pattern seeking machines, we're incredible at it. And the nature of randomness is very interesting, because we're actually extremely bad at perceiving randomness. And I think that's the principle upon which divination probably works is that given a set of random data, human beings will see patterns. And they will be able to relate those patterns meaningfully to things going on
1:46:44
in their randomness is unacceptable. And
Tristan Paylor 1:46:47
it is like, yeah, we want, we kind of need things to be a little more predictable and orderly. It's unsettling to live in chaos. And, you know, trying to sort of use the the ordered movements of the cosmos, to give ourselves a sense of order is comforting. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, you know, as long as you're aware of what it is, you know, and you're not like, I see, you know, dangerous ideas, like I see people look at a birth chart, you know, for someone that somebody's dating, and they're like, oh, this person is definitely a sociopath, or they're definitely a liar. And it's like, no, that's really, really shady.
Kyle Pierce 1:47:28
I, you know, overall, I did have like, a moment of really questioning, you know, am I being objective? Like, am I? Because I had these moments of like, oh, shoot, I'm wondering, you know, is, I bought to show myself that there is no correlation at all, that it's totally random. And while Yeah, part of me did feel maybe a slight relief, I guess, when the statistics seem to confirm it, I was also really pleased that, you know, it indicated a trend, you know, indicated an emphasis or, you know, not all these fighters have had Mars and you don't have to have Mars in Scorpio to fight, you know, or Mars and Capricorn to fight BB a UFC fighter, if that's what you want to do. You could have a Mars in Cancer and do that you could have Mars in Libra, you can have any one of these Mars doesn't do that. But I would like to think that something like this might suggest that you can't. And you might be able to assume some you might be able to, might be tendencies that, you know, maybe you're indicated, but you know, you can't, yeah, if you are about to go on a date with somebody and to get a hold of the birth chart. If you're gonna make a ton of assumptions about them based on that and pre judge them based on it, don't don't look at their chart or don't go on the date with me because we're humans, we're not planets. And you know, while they I think they do something that is demonstratable phenomenon, I don't think that they determine our fate in like a strict sense. Nor do we need them to maybe do many of the things that we want to do. So don't let it like limit you.
Tristan Paylor 1:49:18
Oh, yeah. I think like for me, personally, you know, I have I'm in sort of a weird position and let I definitely identify as a skeptic. And at the same time, you know, I really love stuff like witchcraft and astrology and tarot. And I think for me, it's a recognition that human beings are not perfectly rational creatures. That's just it's it's irrational to think that we are totally rational or that we even could be and there are actually any, you know, and there's like, actual scientific research that does support things like, you know, performing Spiritual rituals being part of spiritual communities. And stuff like that is actually really good for us. It improves our quality of life. You know, when, when you're, you know, doing magic or doing astrology or any of these kinds of things like those, those things may not be scientific. But that doesn't mean that they can't improve your life. And I tend to think that like, trying to deny or reject parts of myself is inadvisable. Like if I were to say, Okay, well, you know, astrology isn't scientific. So therefore, I need to just drop it completely, I would be very sad, because it's the thing that I, you know, take pleasure in. And that gives my life meaning. So, you know, I'm always going to find these patterns and things. And I'm always gonna be interested in what the stars have to say about any given situation. So rather than fighting that tendency, because it's not perfectly rational, I would rather work with that tendency within myself in order to produce something good. And, you know, find a way of reconciling the skeptical side of me with, you know, the more weird side of me. And I think that reconciliation can happen.
Kyle Pierce 1:51:19
I think that having both is kind of part of the human experience, you know, I don't know. Yeah. Whether there is such a thing as randomness, you know. Question one, yeah. I'm like is,
Tristan Paylor 1:51:37
is there true randomness? Like,
Kyle Pierce 1:51:39
is there no meaning to life? Or is there meaning to me astrology? And I guess it hasn't given me a definitive answer. But I guess for me, it's I don't know, because I can like, look at a chart and see things that line up with that, that I believe is goes beyond, you know, my ability to just make patterns. While I would think that, you know, that human tendency is going to skew and affect things a lot, because I'm so skeptical. I don't know, astrology, for me is like a I don't know. The closest thing I think I would ever be able to get to having proof that there is something bigger, I don't know, some sort of higher consciousness or something that maybe people will call God. And I think that's cool. But I kind of want it to stay a little mysterious to me. I don't I don't want it to. I don't want to math the hell out of sight, out of astrology or science.
Tristan Paylor 1:52:52
Yes, I think if it if it was a science I probably like my relationship with it would be totally different. You know, there are areas of science that I'm fascinated with. Obviously, I'm starting to study psychology. So that is one. But astrology is like my attraction to astrology is not as a scientific practice. So, you know, if I were using it scientifically, it wouldn't be the way I do astrology anymore at all.
Kyle Pierce 1:53:26
Would you get a degree in like psychology? Sorry, I'm cutting you off. But if you get a degree in psychology, you don't get a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Good bachelor of the arts, you know?
Tristan Paylor 1:53:37
But you do you can get a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Yeah, I'm getting a bachelor of arts because, you know, my ability to do math when I was in high school to do a science program, but yeah, I might, you know, if I, if I had those grades from high school to be able to pursue it, I might do a Bachelor of Science. Well, I didn't notice that. But that's a totally different area of interest for me than astrology. Astrology is more of a spiritual pursuit for me like it. It feels when I'm doing astrology, it feels like I'm having a conversation with the gods. And conversations are messy. Conversations are unpredictable. Conversations are incredibly subjective or incredibly dependent on on the context in which they take place. They're very emotion based emotion centered. So doing scientific research is not like having a personal conversation with the cosmos so much. And I like yeah, it's the I like I like the personal that I have. I feel like a personal connection with the planets and what they symbolize. I'm like when I do a birth chart reading at all. almost feels like there's a third presence in the room, you know, the presence of the planets are in the room being part of the conversation with us and you know, offering their particular insights or stories relating to that person's life. Yeah.
Kyle Pierce 1:55:17
Yeah. And maybe where we differ, but we're like, I don't know, it's probably so close in the spectrum. Maybe it's Mars overcoming my Jupiter bio square, I have a hard time, I need to know, because he just described I think what astrology is, in terms of like a conversation, like perfectly, I can just put a frame on what astrology is, it would be that, you know, conversation with God or spirit or you know, whatever. But I think for me, I need to note that that conversation is actually happening, that I'm not, not imagining it. And I think, maybe before this data, which you know, isn't conclusive data, but it reinforces for me, my sense that this is an actual thing that I can have a conversation with. And I need that.
Tristan Paylor 1:56:12
Well, yeah, I mean, this is, this is a struggle for me too, or I tend to, you know, vacillate between agnosticism and theism, or somehow, both at the same time, where it's like, intellectually, you know, the most intellectually satisfying answer to me about, you know, the nature of spirit, or God or whatever, is that, that isn't an objective reality, or external reality. But my personal experience is very different from what is personally satisfying as an answer is very different from what is intellectually satisfying as an answer. And I have to find a way to reconcile both of those needs, in my own psyche somehow. And so I tend to land sort of on the fence somewhere, yeah. But I think, you know, in the case of like, the data you've collected, even though it is not scientifically conclusive, and, you know, for all we know, is lay people do their errors, the methodology or something. Yeah, I mean, correlation doesn't prove a cause of any kind, but the act of you doing this research in the first place, is maybe one of the ways you are having that conversation. Like something about God spoke to you and you hear something about it spoke to you on a personal level, whether or not it reflects something objective, it spoke to you personally. And got you thinking about, you know, like, what does Mars and cancer mean? How could, you know, a placement that is, you know, described as being very difficult for Mars related activities? How could that express itself in a very marzi way? And like, having that sort of conversation, I guess, with the principle of Mars you know, that's being facilitated by this data is bringing you some insight you know, into the nature of of people and of aggression and fighting and how we're able to use qualities that on at face value might seem counterproductive, actually use those qualities to achieve things in an area you wouldn't expect. Yeah.
Kyle Pierce 1:58:30
I think is that I think part of it is my favorite thing that that astrologers told me, you know, I don't know are just the story that it's telling me is maybe on a Westerners like the story of the underdog or like the person overcoming, you know, there is personal challenges. I mean, it's the hero's journey, right? Is you know, it's always you know, a monster of some kind that you're you're trying to slay but at the end of the day, it's it's the monster within you conquering and I like that story of Mars and cancer struggling you know, trying to find a way to express itself as Mars and you know, finding that in a place like the UFC mixed martial arts hopefully not breaking anybody slig Conor McGregor I can't watch that video. I guess I generally see it as positive and I get a ton of entertainment out of it so thank you for entertaining me. People who fight gladiators barbaric colony mean it is pretty barbaric, but we needed an outlet for that
Tristan Paylor 1:59:53
stuff. Yeah, society. I think This also touches on you know, another one of the functions of astrology, for me is entertainment. And I feel like that's another area where people tend to, like I think a lot of astrologers resist having their services described as like an entertainment service or an entertainment product, because somehow we see entertainment is something that's frivolous, or meaningless or a diversion, or not capable of providing any, like genuine guidance. But it's like, when you watch a really compelling movie, or read a really compelling novel, you suspend disbelief. And you enter a different place, you enter a place of play. And when you enter that place, you often discover really important things about yourself and your life and the people around you and the world that you live in. Like, you know, there have been when I was transitioning, that was a really difficult time in my life when I was going through my gender transition. And I used stories as a way of coping. I read medieval romances, and I read comics, and I read stories in in comic books about heroes that reminded me of myself in some way. And reading those stories enabled me to find meaning in my situation, and like I can remember not I entered that sort of state where you've been through so much that you can't feel anymore. And there was a period of time where I could not cry for months and months and months on end. And you know, prior to that, I'd always been a big crier, I, you know, cry it dog from commercials, I'm starting to, you know, some of that is starting to come back to me. But there was a long period where I could not shed a tear, even if I wanted to. And I remember finishing this really incredible story, and just bawling my eyes out. And everything just in that moment suddenly made sense. And I felt everything that I needed to feel to get through what I was going through. And that's an entertainment product. Like that was a comic series that did that to me. So calling something entertainment, describing ourselves as entertainers and storytellers is also not a criticism, like that is a compliment, in my opinion.
Kyle Pierce 2:02:31
Yeah. No, yeah. I mean, that's, that's how I'm, I don't know, I think, say, you know, nihilistic world, you know, entertainment is how we connect to spirituality in a lot of ways. Yeah. Whatever you want to call spirituality. I mean, I connect to spirituality, to me is meaning and you make meaning through stories, you know, seeing your life in the context of a story. And we, you know, entertainment gives us that, you know, are we we connect to that usually through entertainment, very consumer II kind of word, entertainment.
Tristan Paylor 2:03:16
Well, I think that's part of it. Like, I think maybe that's part of why we have that sort of negative connotation with it. Because it's just like, oh, you know, it's something, something that you buy just as a sort of diversion or whatever is just like a money making thing. But yeah, when you listen to a beautiful piece of music, or you know, you watch or like even you know, you watch a comedian at work, like, that's a skill. Being being an entertainer, a storyteller is a skill that makes life more tolerable. And I think, as an astrologer, I don't see myself as a scientist, I see myself as an entertainer and I take pride in being a good entertainer, and helping people find entertainment in their own stories. Yeah, like, it's a lot more personal and individualized, as a form of entertainment.
2:04:00
I mean, isn't isn't everything just like entertainment, you know, striking. Die.
Tristan Paylor 2:04:06
The Mars in Aquarius is showing.
Kyle Pierce 2:04:08
I don't know, I think it's Neptune in Capricorn. I think there's something that is like the most trying to lose oneself and like the lack of meaning. And
Tristan Paylor 2:04:20
exactly, I love I love Neptune in Capricorn as a symbol for the millennial generation. Because it's just like, what what are my you know, wildest dreams and fantasies? I just want job security. Yeah, yeah. My wild dreams and fantasies are not all that wild and fantastic. I just I just want to live like please just give me a job I don't hate enough money to live like that's all yes. That's That's my big unrealistic dream. That's my Neptunian fish. It does seem illusory. Being able to comfortably
Kyle Pierce 2:04:58
Yeah, that does seem rather nebulous, and that could be a whole episode. I couldn't. Yeah, um, I think, you know, speaking of Capricorn, everything you're thinking saying was making me think of like Saturn saying, like, oh, yeah, there's your entertainment. And I'll get back to work, you know. And, you know, whether Saturn, it's just a symbol that we create, to describe, you know, an experience in our lives that, you know, I wouldn't have been able to really articulate in the same way, I think, without astrology, or whether Saturn as a planet is sending, you know, rays at the earth and influencing our behavior in some tangible way or something else, you know, only No, but I don't necessarily think that astrology is value is rooted in science, even though there may be a phenomenon. I think there's phenomenon that can be scientifically measured. But I don't know, do you have a way to wrap this up in a bow?
Tristan Paylor 2:06:09
I'm tired. I guess. My, my ultimate answer is, is no. The scientific consensus is that astrology is not a science. And I think you know, the conclusion of 1000s of x experts who have spent 1000s of hours studying science is good enough for me to say no, until you know, the day arrives, that the scientific consensus changes for some reason, I'm going to continue to say no. And if there ever is something verifiably scientific behind astrology, I think it would probably be something that we don't expect. And it would probably revolutionize the way people do astrology. But that is all entirely like, you know, me. Let's see, I was supposed to be tying this.
Kyle Pierce 2:07:11
There's no way to tie this in a bow. But yeah.
Tristan Paylor 2:07:15
Yeah, I'll just stick they'll just stick with my conclusion, the scientific consensus is that the answer is no. And if that is the consensus of experts in the field of science, then I am going to side with that consensus until something really convinces me otherwise. And I strongly doubt it will. But I'm always open to changing my ideas, because that is the skeptical position is to always keep an open mind. So always be prepared to change your beliefs in the face of new evidence.
Kyle Pierce 2:07:44
My conclusion is that astrology is science and I Kyle Pierce have proved it today. Standing by that
Tristan Paylor 2:07:53
irrefutably, irrefutable evidence, not only has Kyle proven that astrology is scientific, but he has also proven that Mars in Cancer is the best placement for you. Fighters. Do you want to Yeah, so all you Mars in Cancer folks and ruin people's faces? I yeah, I will. I want to see some like Rocky style montages from all of you. Like get your get your boxing gloves out. Get your your gym shorts out, get your punching bag hung up.
Kyle Pierce 2:08:26
That's what I was. You know what, prepping for this show today, like waiting for you to finish your your notes. I felt like I was montage I was like, Yeah, I'm back. I'm proving science and like, great. Proving, proving that astrology is science.
Tristan Paylor 2:08:46
I'm truly I'm proving that science is
2:08:49
science is real guys. You heard me
Tristan Paylor 2:08:52
and I mean, if we could you know define science to that would be that would be great.
2:08:58
Can scientists even define science?
Tristan Paylor 2:09:02
Yeah, when I was when I was digging into the philosophy of science I came across this this fellow whose name I'm going to mispronounce Paul fear Abend. Notch sure how to say his name. His position is that it's not possible to define the scientific method. So it's certainly an interesting position. Although he's also taken some like pretty controversial positions. Like he's defended creationism and stuff like that. So yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I would have pulled him as my intellectual idol. But I'm certainly curious about his ideas. See, that's,
Kyle Pierce 2:09:43
I feel like speaking I don't know. Referring to Neptune. Capricorn. Yeah, I'd be like, I don't know. I guess you can dismantle reality so easily, I guess when you make it. Easy for Neptune Capricorn to do. Because yeah, you can argue anything you can are argue make debate, you know, you can took a debate class or, you know, you just you form arguments that are in internally cohesive, and you can win a debate that way.
Tristan Paylor 2:10:12
I mean, you can form arguments that are not internally cohesive at all, but as long as it's, it's its own category,
Kyle Pierce 2:10:19
and I guess, you know, especially in a time where, you know, truth seems to be a dividing factor, or, you know, where we get our, you know, sources of truth from it seems to be problematic right now, you know, and I don't want to encourage people to be dismissive of science or be dismissive of facts. But you know, I think it maybe, pardon, he just wants to, to inch you know, astrology a little further and to just give it some credibility, that, you know, that there is that, you know, just maybe there's some science there, I think, I think of science think it's, it's kind of kind of science. Um, but you know, doesn't necessarily need to be and I don't know, stay critical. believe in nothing, or just be open minded to. I don't know, I'm not gonna tell anybody how to be. You know, I think that I just I agree with you, Tristan, that, you know, keeping an open mind to do things is cool. It's in style.
Tristan Paylor 2:11:49
Yeah. Where we're making it trendy right now. Yep. keeping an open mind is the trend. All right.
Kyle Pierce 2:12:01
Kristen, do you have anything you want to plug?
Tristan Paylor 2:12:07
I would like to thank Declan for his question. That was one of the most challenging questions I think we've been asked. And I will be thinking about the stuff that I learned doing research for this episode, I think for a very long time. So thank you Declan. For such a thought provoking and important question. I have birth chart consultations open that are $35 for 75 minutes over zoom. And you can book one of those through my website, which is bad sign astrology.ca. And you can find me on Instagram and Tumblr also as bad sign astrology.
Kyle Pierce 2:12:56
Awesome. Um, I also want to thank Declan Ford being perhaps the wisest human being that I know. I also you can book consultations with me on my website, Kyle Pierce astrology.com. You can also check out my Etsy page for recorded Birth Chart readings. I'll leave a link in the show notes. But just by looking up fluorescent X black in the it's at the search bar. And now that I have a break in the strategy hotline, hopefully no one throws any really awesome questions at us for at least like a week. Want to record finally, the next episode of killer Cosmos, it's coming. It's about to burst out of me been reading everything about Hitler. And, you know, the most awful time in human history World War Two, because, you know, that's what I like to do in my spare time. But yeah, that we'll call it a day.
Tristan Paylor 2:14:09
Right? Sounds good to me. Okay. And I hope that listeners will send in their questions. Please don't be shy.
Kyle Pierce 2:14:18
Yes, please send us questions. Scratch what I said before send us questions. Also, you know, leaving a review is awesome. You can just throwing some stars on an episode and whatever, you know, podcast rating,
Tristan Paylor 2:14:35
not just some small five stars like specifically excellent stars. All of the stars. Yes. All the
Kyle Pierce 2:14:42
stars settle for nothing less. It's worth every word. Six stars, I think. Do you think Tristan Yeah, seven?
Tristan Paylor 2:14:49
I would say so. I would give myself 10 stars out of five
Kyle Pierce 2:14:58
Yeah, you know, sharing the podcast with friend also helps so thank you all for listening and see you next time
Tristan Paylor 2:15:13
if you have a question about astrology or about your birth chart that you would like to hear answered on astrology hotline, email us at astrologyhotlinepod@gmail.com
