[deltaonefour]

The man is asking for the opportunity to prove his point. We should listen. Because throughout human history humanity has exiled people who had the crazy idea that the sun was the center of the solar system.

We've been wrong before, and we're likely going to be wrong again.

That the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade and ideas.

In light of that knowledge that we may be wrong, the best course of action, the safest course of action, is to go ahead and listen to the ideas on the other side.

The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself verified by the scientific method.

Those are the ideas that we can safely act upon. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge.

That, at any rate, is the theory of the US constitution itself. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

[LeonB]

It’s worth making a distinction between new and unproven ideas versus old and unproven ideas.

[deltaonefour]

The earth being the center of the solar system was an old and ingrained idea at the time. It was so old an ingrained that the mere mention of heliocentricism prompted the exact same emotions and reactions you are seeing now towards astrology.

I personally agree with you. But I feel it is wrong to call what he says a joke or simply not give him the opportunity to prove himself. That would be a mistake that humanity has made several times resulting in delayed progress of many revolutionary ideas.

Our bias constructs a reality so believable that we cannot differentiate it from the objective truth. To escape our own bias means going against our instincts to listen to an idea that seems preposterous or "crazy,"

[epgui]

Old and _disproven_.

[deltaonefour]

Astrologers make vague predictions that handily avoid falsification. Any fraudulent operation involving prophecies would obviously do this to stay as seemingly legitimate as long as possible. Not saying astrology is illegitimate but it is certainly very probable.

Therefore technically speaking, your statement is wrong. Astrology has NOT been disproven.

[epgui]

Your line of thinking works for an astrologer's individual claims, but falls short of applying to astrology as a whole. We _know_ astrology to be systematically _incorrect_.

[deltaonefour]

Putting two underscores around the word "_know_" doesn't lend any credence to your claim.

Nothing can be known or proven in science. We don't know in the same way as we don't know whether or not Christianity or any other major religion is correct or "_incorrect_".

[epgui]

The underscores are used to indicate italics in markdown. I wasn't being flippant.

> Nothing can be known or proven in science.

Since we're trying to be pedantic, on the contrary, things can very much be known or proven in "natural science" (I am assuming that you are not talking about "formal science", because then your comment would be even more unreasonable). Of course whether something is provable or knowable depends on the nature of the thing itself.

> we don't know whether or not Christianity or any other major religion is correct or incorrect

Theology is a big can of worms, but these big objects should be broken down into smaller pieces: whereas science cannot possibly prove or disprove the existence of a "God" (depending on the definition we use, and the characteristics we ascribe to such an entity), science does very much inform us on the boundaries within which, or outside of which, theology can reside. For instance, we know that it is impossible to transform water into wine, at least in any real sense and in conditions relevant to biblical texts.

[LeonB]

Disproven ideas are a subset of the unproven ideas.

Trying to distinguish whether or not a specific idea from astrology is or is not “disproven” means you waste time arguing about topics many of which are too vague to be falsifiable.

So I chose the word “unproven” on purpose and I stand by it, because it’s the correct word.

[epgui]

I agree with you, my intention was not to suggest you chose the incorrect word, but rather to push your idea even farther.

Of course the problem with using the word "disproven" like I did, and like you correctly pointed out, is that we're referring to a very loosely defined and nebulous set of ideas. To disprove something requires a precise definition of the thing in the first place.

I would argue that this difficulty is not necessarily fatal to the argument. It is an inevitable difficulty (and please pardon me as I get into a semantic argument), because the word "astrology" cannot be made to map to real mechanisms, phenomena, or "real life things". The set of ideas we refer to under any reasonable definition of "astrology" are incoherent with reality as a whole.

One could reduce the set of ideas behind astrology to be "merely unfalsifiable" and/or "merely unfalsified" by eliminating all demonstrably incorrect ideas, but then I am not sure that we would be left with enough ideas to still call it "astrology": the thing would have lost its essence and most of its usual meaning.

The approach I just described is reductionist, or deconstructive. Consider the inverse (or "constructive") approach: start with an obviously-wrong idea, and attach to it many other subordinate or secondary ideas, some of which might be right, some of which might be unprovable. Give this set of ideas a new name. As a whole, the set of ideas is still wrong if it is essentially wrong, or predicated on wrong ideas. The addition of extra ideas to the collection only serves to confuse people, but doesn't make it "less wrong" as a whole.

[saganus]

I don't think I understand how are disproven ideas a subset of unproven ones.

Disproven means, "proven to be false", while unproven means there is no proof yet, either positive or negative, right?

How can one be a subset of the other?

[deltaonefour]

Technically nothing in science is proven.