Or neural nets trained to detect cancers from patient photographs, that end up learning "if the patient has a ruler next to them, then they have cancer"

Reminds me of Orson Welles story about cold reading.

https://youtu.be/IjPsnfysrp8

> A student there mentioned she wasn’t sure what to specialize in – photography, graphic design or maybe industrial design?

It was also the first element in the list. Humans tend to sort by preference, often subconsciously.

That's how they make you believe, by using basic human patterns/behaviours, they don't read stars/cards/palms, they read you and make you believe they know more about you than yourself, which can be helpful in some ways if you never self reflect.

We do sort but it can be hard to know the order, if you ask whether they eat their favorite food first or last it can give you a valuable clue as to how they sort

Reading people's emotions, face, body language, and getting them to give you money for it...its a sales job like any other. I'm sure car salesmen would make decent astrologers if they threw on some shawls and golden bracelets.

Agreed. Listening and observing strangers carefully is a tremendous skill. Here's an experiment worth doing at Y Combinator: give some, but not all, your teams of entrepreneurs some active-listening practice sessions. Then observe the outcomes. Hypothesis: the companies with the active-listening training will do better sooner.