Barnum Statements

I had a friend who was one of the brightest people I have ever met who read her horoscope everyday, she claimed they were accurate. I suspect she was having some fun at my expense given how bright she was, I can't believe she really put stock in horoscopes.

Horoscopes like most personality profiles are nothing more than Barnum statements. Which are statements of subjective validation in which a person finds personal meaning although the statements themselves apply to many people. This effect was named after nonother than P. T. Barnum, who of course said "There is a sucker born every minute".

Examples of typical Barnum statements are:

• You have a great need for other people to like and admire you
• At times you have serious doubts whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
• You tend to be too self critical
• You’re an independent and creative thinker
• You do not accept what others tell you to believe
• Some of your goals seem to be a little unrealistic

The list goes on and on and on.

These types of statements apply to most everyone and of course people see themselves within such statements. Barnum statements are used by psychics and astrologers of all creeds to great success, mostly because people want to believe in such rubbish.

Literally astrology can be defined as the system of beliefs in which knowledge of the relative positions of celestial bodies is used to interpret, predict and organize information about personality, human affairs, and other terrestrial matters.

The astrological charts which modern astrologers use are based upon Ptolemaic tables, which is funny, because Ptolemy left out one of the original signs of the Zodiac which the Babylonians orginally included in their charts when they created this bullshit 4300 years ago...the other really funny thing about these tables, is that they are still used today...if the stars really did have magical effects on our lives, the predictors would still be wrong as their charts have not been updated to reflect the 5 days difference between where stars actually are versus where the charts say they are....oh and for those people who love their newspaper/website horoscope you might be shocked to know these are now created by software which uses random Barnum statements.