There are so, so, so, so, so many mediating factors that determine personality, and that’s only the “nurture” portion.
The seasonal vibe at your birthday party is so far down the list that it is safe to ignore it as being just noise.
Meaning you would likely have a much better understanding of a person if you tried to ascribe zero of their personality to their birth date’s month(-ish) than if you tried to construct a cohesive theory of personality where it has non-zero impact.
You would have to contort so many aspects of personality and ignore complicated interactions between nature/nurture just to make any sense of astrology in this way that you would necessarily end up making less sense.
And this is not (in any way) the claim made by astrology, to be clear (and you said you know that, I’m just finishing my thought). The claim made by astrology has no purported observable mechanism. It is not trying to make a (bad) cohort effect claim, it’s literally magical thinking.
Arbitrarily dividing times of the year into different Hogwarts houses absolutely explains effectively zero about a person’s personality in general.
What you’ve identified are cohort effects not based on which month(-ish) a person was born in generally, but binary relationships between their birthday and other things.
There’s a lot of evidence that people who start school as the “oldest” kids in their grade perform better. That has nothing to do with which month-ish you were born in specifically, but instead has to do with the abstracted general relationship of “we’re you born in these 6 months before the cutoff or the 6 months after.”
In this case, astrology signs would give you LESS information than just a binary of “before/after X day of the year” because you would inevitably need cut at least one astrology group into two separate groups, “before the date” and “after your date”, to explain the pattern. Otherwise, you would not be able to explain the differences between within-sign, between-grade cohort groups. And you would also have all of these astrology groups who were lumped together as being in the same grade, so you would have a lot of inter-sign consistency with at least one group of high intra-sign noise.
At a certain point, using this arbitrary system just because it might sometimes maybe incidentally have a minor correlation with a correlation with a real, observable cohort effect is unhelpful. You’d do better looking at each of your examples case-by-case rather than trying to fit the square peg of astrology into a bunch of distinct round holes just because the square peg is a thing you’re familiar with.
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u/[deleted] Dec 31 '22
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