I'll double down. Yes, I think all of these that have been practiced by large groups of people and demographics have had some utility of some kind. Their explanations for why they work may be completely wrong.
> divination through the study of entrails and birdwatching;
Note that this poster argued the value of astrology indirectly. It's not the stars, it's the value of thinking about personality.
One explanation of this is that entrails are a kind of canvas for a Rorschach test that allows the individual to examine their thoughts. Or perhaps just making time to examine the entrails gives them time to ponder in a quiet environment.
I'll give one more example which is divination rods, demonstrated to not be able to find water in controlled experiments. However, the current explanation for their usefulness is that it gives the user an opportunity to observe natural clues that suggest where water is.
Not a lot of people are emotionally invested in divination rods. It's safe to speak poorly of them and just suggest more direction tools. But in cases where many people derive meaning from it, I think it's best not to disparage.
Was newtonian physics a bad model? Yes it was inaccurate but it lead to soo many discoveries.
I kinda got into this rabbit whole of thinking myself when I was practicing some martial arts and the instructor was kinda into eastern spiritualism. Talking about channels and energies and all that kind of nonsense. But at some point I realized that I didn’t need to believe in the model for it to be useful, following the movements, practices and meditation did help me enormously and get me into better shape. And some of the explanations did have predictive power, even if I knew they were totally made up things.
Knowing lorents transformation and quantum mechanics does not invalidate the predictive power of newtonian physics for solving common everyday tasks, you just know that if you want to get deeper, you need a more accurate model.
Same with astrology, its a model, as others have said its value might not stem from its absolute predictive power, but the social interactions it generates.
People want to talk about personalities and astrology does offer a fun and whimsical way if going about it.
I’ve actually listened in to recordings of people going to see astrology “pros” and it’s remarkable how close what they were trying to do was to psychiatrists, just using different tools.
“Oh, you’re a bit self obsessed and have trouble from your childhood interaction with you parents! This is probably because of this planet doing this”
To laypeople who don’t understand psychology that might sound exactly the same as some scientific term / explanation…
Not saying its the same by any means, just that there is “some” value in the exchange for people, and calling things stupid and nonsense knida misses a lot of nuance.
I mean, this seems like a weird conclusion. People like believing in stuff, so they believe in stuff; arguably the nature of the stuff is irrelevant. Astrology is just one of thousands of religious/pseudo-religious systems. Romans preferred to do their divination through the study of entrails and birdwatching; must those also have been useful (except in the context of providing belief and ceremony)? (They did eventually kind of adopt astrology, but it was viewed as a suspect foreign practice at least until the early empire).
> Like the “flat earth model” is actually extremely useful if you don’t intend (can’t) travel significant distances - gives you a coordinate system
By the time anyone really had coordinate systems, educated people knew the world wasn't flat. There's this persistent belief that the world not being flat is a relatively new discovery (I think people confuse it with heliocentricity), but this isn't true. Modern flat-earth-ism is a creation of the 19th century, not a continuation of some traditional belief system.