It's actually pretty well documented that birthdates affect outcomes in society, for example in athletics (1). It's called the relative age effect (2).
You would have to control for this if you wanted to convince anyone that it was due to the positions of stellar objects.
Was the phenomenon of determined in experiments that controlled for Stellar object positions?
Even then, correlation does not equal causation... so that means both astrology and the relative age effect quantitatively stand on equal ground in terms of causative possibilities.
HN's leaning against astrology is, in fact, from an empirical and logical perspective.. biased. Much of peoples' conclusions are formulated from anecdotal and circumstantial experiences, which has validity and is a conclusion I ultimately agree with... but looking at the totality of the reaction to this question, objectively it is a window into the nature of human bias.
I didn't say anything about causation vs correlation, just that the RAE is well studied. It's in essence a large amount of research on the correlation of the relative age of people that all participate in the same activities around the same dates (unsurprisingly, younger ages correlated with worse outcomes in many cases). The athletics research is interesting because of how far back the data goes, which does actually control for astrological effects as things like season start dates and school year schedules haven't been set in stone.
I think you're inferring a bias against pseudoscience, which is good because the core of learning more about our universe is skepticism and finding empirical evidence to confirm belief. I don't believe you can find any such evidence for astrology that doesn't have a far simpler and compelling explanation, thus it would be extremely difficult to convince anyone that astrology "works."
Construct a hypothesis that's testable and conduct an experiment, either directly or through the collection of evidence. Then analyze and contrast against other explanations to draw conclusions. That's what it comes down to. It doesn't sound like you have done that.
Even then, correlation does not equal causation... so that means both astrology and the relative age effect quantitatively stand on equal ground in terms of causative possibilities.
HN's leaning against astrology is, in fact, from an empirical and logical perspective.. biased. Much of peoples' conclusions are formulated from anecdotal and circumstantial experiences, which has validity and is a conclusion I ultimately agree with... but looking at the totality of the reaction to this question, objectively it is a window into the nature of human bias.