Are astrology-believers idiots?

Everyone’s talking astrology because a political action figure had a belief in it. I’m piling on. From Atrios:

For an agnostic/atheist like myself lots of religious beliefs sound pretty nutty to me, but as Amy Sullivan keeps telling us we keep losing elections because people like me aren’t sufficiently respectful of religious beliefs even though, you know, we generally are. And, now, from left to right, from Tap to TNR to the wingnutosphere, people are falling all over themselves to mock someone who had a perfectly mainstream belief apparently shared by millions and millions of Americans.

I find that rather odd.

There’s one main difference between astrology and religious belief systems: Astrology yields testable hypotheses that can be disconfirmed. People tend to believe in religion and astrology for the same reasons though: it seems valid, the predictions tend to be vague enough to find a ‘hit’ if you’re trying for one, and people are unwilling to let it go when disconfirmations happen. Other than that, astrology makes falsifiable claims where religion generally doesn’t.

And when those claims are tested, they fail. Here’s a reference to a Nature article in which astrologers were unable to match peoples’ psychological profiles to their natal charts at an accuracy greater than random chance. I did go and photocopy (and read) the article; most worth it. This post from Skeptico has many other references to astrological disconfirmations. (No links, sadly. Might have to use that library thing.)

So I don’t believe in astrology because it doesn’t work. Not everyone is aware of this, however. That doesn’t mean they’re idiots.

I repeat: People who believe in astrology aren’t idiots. I wasn’t an idiot when I believed in religion. I was a reasonably smart guy. I just didn’t know what good evidence looked like. And I was unaware of the cognitive blind spots that people have when reasoning under multivariate conditions, including confirmation bias and shoehorning. Once those two situations were rectified, I could see religion for the unsubstantiated rubbish that it is. And I dumped it. If I’d kept believing after that, then I would be an idiot, and a dishonest idiot at that.

Do I have crazy, unsubstantiated beliefs? I’m sure I do. And when I find out I have ’em, I dump ’em.

Your help in this matter would be appreciated. If I slip up, point it out. I’ll gleefully do the same for you.