- cross-posted to:
- atheism
- cross-posted to:
- atheism
Edit: I accidentally refreshed the page and it offered alternative questions for ID validation, such as high school of graduation and SSN. But it’s still absurd to expect someone to even humor the premise of the prompt.
Why is that a superstition? It is trivial to write a program to calculate corresponding zodiac sign of any particular date. It’s just a bad captcha and I don’t think most people remember/know enough to calculate in their head.
The questions still valid… Why would I simply be aware what year I was born in under the Chinese zodiac so that I could get a new SS card. You are missing the forest for the trees.
Because you have Google. I suspect most people know their star sign. (The Chinese Zodiac is something different.) I don’t believe in astrology, but it’s certainly common enough that it seems difficult to avoid learning at some point. If not, you can find out in 30 seconds.
All it is is an abstraction to make it slightly harder for bad actors and computer programs, not an endorsement of astrology.
Zodiac signs are about as accurate as tarot readings or reading tea leaves. They’re even wrong about what they are based on. The star locations and sun precession hasn’t coincided with the original 12 zodiac constellations for centuries. People use the dates and signs as they were set by astrology tradition ages ago, but the dates when the sun changes from one constellation to the next is also absolutely arbitrary to make it match exactly 4 and a half weeks.
The personality descriptions for zodiac signs are textbook examples of cold reading. A technique of making intentionally ambiguous but agreeable affirmations so that people project their self-view onto the descriptions disregarding evidence or specifities.
It is a superstition as it is the belief on the supernatural influence of the relative apparent position of stars in the sky over the behavior and personality of individuals. It’s a, mostly, harmless superstition, but superstitious none the less.
I think it’s at a sort of weird crossroads between superstition and factual data, because it is trivial to calculate the factual data regarding the position of any star in the sky at any point, but the superstition comes in when you associate the positions of a rather arbitrary group of stars in relation to a date of birth.
I just thought of this though- you could argue that this is an anti-astrology security measure because it proves that you can’t guess someone’s zodiac sign based on things like their interests and personality traits.
Of course the part associating zodiac sign with personality or fate is clearly superstition.
that’s such a capricorn thing to say