Back at USC, I took an entertaining and aphorism-packed television writing class taught by a real character, Stanley Ralph Ross. (He wrote about a third of the original Batman episodes!) One of his many, many, many tips & tricks that he taught was to “Learn astrology and then forget it.” He didn’t believe in astrology, but he found it useful when he didn’t quite have a handle on a minor character to assign the character one of the zodiac signs and use that to at least give the role something of a default personality and perspective.
These things should all be considered pseudoscience…
And probably even systems with studiability and reproducibility problems like…
- Joseph Campbell’s monomyth
- Ayahuasca
- Myers-Briggs types
- Enneagrams (where I have scored high as a “3”, but also as a “1”, “7”, and “4”)
None deserve belief or faith, but all may be instructive and insightful. Whether intended as a con or a genuine delusion, a I think a well-performed “cold reading” might be as insightful as a good therapy session.
Human biology and culture has a lot of common substrate. So it’s unsurprising that it can reveal itself in various guises.