Refuting astrology

Finally looked into something Sheldon mentioned way back in episode 1-16 of The Big Bang Theory, namely the work of Bertrand Forer. In 1948 he gave a personality test to all his students, but instead of giving them individual evaluations, he gave them all the same description of their personality, which he had compiled from newspaper astrology sections. The students in return gave the description an average 4.26 out of 5 accuracy score, believing of course that the professor had himself carefully evaluated each one. for more details read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

This agrees with something else that I read elsewhere that is also very interesting. I believe it was in the amazing poker book Winning Strategies in No-limit Hold'em. The concept is that, while humans are great at discovering patterns, we are absolutely awful at measuring frequencies of events. That latter part is the only thing that keeps astrologers in business - meaning that even though they're going to err some 98% of the time, people are completely unable to remember that frequency and what it represents (that it's all bullshit), and instead tend to only remember those times some predictions seems to click magically (which of course must happen through sheer repetition).