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AW: Statistical agreements are not quite the same thing as hard evidence.

I am not in a contest with traditional astrologers - they do what they do and I do what I do. All the same I would be happy to contend that I can produce better statistical agreement in the kind of test I just mentioned with my TO8 than astrologers can with their signs of the Zodiac.

AW: I don't believe that astrologers can find any statistics to back up their claims.

That's true. Mostly, it has to be said because no one has done the right kind of test. Everyone's looking in the wrong place for an agreement. It kind of confirms my assertion that the origins of personality is not yet understood. I mean, one example test of astrology matched occupations with star sign. Some kind of gross matching of occupation to star sign is a ludicrously poor method of finding out what someone is like. People can do many jobs. I have had scores of jobs, absorbed many skills. But none of them would define my personality for you. Most of what we do depends on what's around at the time, what's needed. It's how we relate to what we do that counts, and in this respect it is how others judge us and how we judge others that is crucial. And I've not seen any studies that have looked at astrology from this angle.

AW: You may be right. To go back a bit. You are very interested in creativity and inspiration. So where did your inspiration come from?

I was inspired to disprove astrology in the first instance because I mistrusted its value as a means of improving ourselves. The information should be useful in our drive to understand our lives, and yet...I'm not sure that anything I know about astrology is any practical help to me at all. You go into it in any depth and you start to come across contradictions. Surely the contradictions should be on the surface, and the deeper in you go the more the meaning is clarified. But Astrology is not like that. In depth, you find a snake's nest of qualifications and contradictions. So I was also inspired to replace astrology by something simple and formal and which bore no relation whatever to its system.

AW: But the TO8 uses a birth date to define a personality just like astrology.

If we share something, it's the idea that birth affects a developmental process in our brains, although I think Astrologers are a little more mystical than that.

AW: So what is personality? Isn't it just being a Human?

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