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army1987 comments on Global warming is a better test of irrationality that theism - Less Wrong
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A common error people make when they see an old vs. young split in opinion is assuming that it must be an age effect rather than a cohort effect. Thank you for avoiding that mistake by noticing that it could be either! (Maybe I could use that as a rationality litmus test, ha ha.)
You got me curious! I pulled up a chapter from the NSE's latest Science & Engineering Indicators report; it links a spreadsheet of survey results from 1979 to 2010 on how scientific US adults think astrology is. (Strictly this isn't the same thing as believing in astrology but I'd expect it to be a fair proxy.) In the 2010 sample, people who were young, female, less educated, or knew fewer science facts were more likely to think astrology was scientific.
I should say that this doesn't automatically mean astrology is a worse rationality test than atheism. Atheism itself correlates with sex, race, age, and education level, at least in the US.
Assuming by “young” they mean (say) younger than 18 rather than (say) younger than 50 (and that they're talking about age effects rather than cohort effects), and with the possible exception of gender, that does sound like a description of the groups of people who I'd expect to be less rational. Hence, that doesn't sound like as strong a reason to doubt the effectiveness of belief-in-astrology as a test for rationality as finding that people from South Examplistan are more likely to believe in astrology than people from North Examplistan.
"Young" is my own way of summarising the results for the different age subgroups; I saw no correlation with age for ages >34, but people aged 18-24 thought astrology was more scientific than people aged 25-34, who in turn thought it more scientific than people aged 35+. (The sample had no under-18s, unfortunately.) In any case, astrology seems like a good item to add to a potential list of rationality probes.