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Comment by _5659 | Hacker News Reader

I read a paper once about an ancient tribe of hunters who had exhausted the local fauna and consulted the wisdom of the spirits through an oracle bone ceremony for the next bounty.

In essence, the oracle bone would give them a random direction. If there was nothing, they'd ask again, if there was something, they would keep asking. Doesn't matter. The important function of consulting the oracle bones was that they were randomly distributing their hunting patterns without overexhausting one particular area within range. This allows the population of game to stabilize over time.

tldr

If you're looking for answers, searching at random and searching frequently is probably the most efficient method instead of wasting time figuring out how to find it.

"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition." -Alan Turing

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Indeed, that is the purpose and action of the Horoscope column running in every newspaper.

It doesn't matter which "sign" gets which advice; all that matters is that different people get different advice, and get different advice this week than they got last week. The whole birthdate apparatus is purely a randomizing device.

It is a remarkably sophisticated psychological technology that keeps people from getting stuck in ruts, and not paralyzed by indecision. It just doesn't do what its promoters think it does.

I think Co-star is fascinating for this reason because it's not so much the science of belief but the charisma of truth. People like it mostly because it's kind of sassy. For the most part, sun-moon-rising offers a quick and dirty way to assess relationship compatibility in a dating-app world where rejecting everyone and accepting everyone is tedious and exhausting. It's also a particular love language of understanding and explaining what it is you look for and being aware of how people explain themselves, for those that use it.

Technically, astrology is based on algorithms observing data of the planets positions. For the most part, to the naked eye, and to human sensibility, the planets seem to behave in harmony, resonance and stability. In reality, the long-term behavior varies chaotically. It's an n-body problem, which is as of this time of writing, unsolved. Generally, that doesn't mean it hasn't been answered, rather it means that solutions satisfying specific conditions cannot be determined by the criteria of uniqueness or existence.

But yeah, if you're going to make short term observations of a chaotic system, a sporadically random system is basically just numerical approximation. You don't need to rationalize irrationality, because you can't.

Planetary motion is absolutely predictable, to the millisecond decades in advance. It just doesn't correlate with anything else, making it useful for randomizing the "else".

The sun's apparent motion correlates with sleep schedules, decreasingly, and the moon's with tides and animal behavior, making those less useful for the purpose.

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