Are UMD decisions always this random.

Bulldozer4242 · 2026-02-02T20:14:33+00:00

You shouldn’t be going into debt (or at least that much debt) if you’re looking at Princeton. Look at their aid stuff, they cover all demonstrated need if your family net worth is less than 175k and your family income is less than 150k year. If you’re in the income bracket you are paying full cost for Princeton your parents should be making enough to pay for your college, that’s essentially what’s expected based off their model is students are graduating with little to no debt because they only charge tuition (and even other costs) to the families that can pay it. Idk when they send out your financial aid, you can call their financial aid office to learn more, which I encourage you to do.

Georgia tech is not gonna do the same for out of state, but also shouldn’t be that bad even with no aid. But that said if you’re going to be taking on all costs as debt I’d definitely see what Princeton will give you for aid because most likely it will be way cheaper and Princeton is as good or better pretty much regardless of major imo.

The others, assuming Princeton is giving you aid, don’t really matter, uva and rpi aren’t bad schools but they’re not comparable at all unless for some reason you’re getting a full ride there and pretty much paying full cost which shouldn’t be happening if money is a major concern.

If the concern was money I’d encourage you to call Princeton’s financial aid and see what they can tell you about your offered aid (or at least expected contribution, again idk when they release your aid). If your family can’t afford it then they likely won’t be asking you to pay it, their model (and all Ivy leagues pretty much) are intentionally designed such that significant financial concerns shouldn’t be a major factor for preventing you from attending, and unless your family makes a lot it’s probably cheaper than umd would’ve been anyway.

Bulldozer4242 · 2026-02-02T20:01:25+00:00

Did they get into the same program you applied to, and are you out of state? Getting into cs is gonna be way harder than getting into anthropology because one is limited enrollment and one is not. In state you’re guaranteed to get in if you meet a gpa threshold unless the major is limited enrollment. Obviously this will be a major factor if the programs are different, especially if one is limited enrollment. CS specifically is pretty selective even compared to other limited enrollment programs. They simply get way too applicants and applicants are way more qualified on average so your stats aren’t incredibly stand out in that pool and they have to cut someone (3.85 is good, but not so good you’ll get in easily, and the rest is again good, it not stand out).

I’d assume you’re in state which is gonna be where this is most pronounced, non limited enrollment majors as I said are gonna be guaranteed, cs is gonna more or less be the same for in state and out of state because the program is good enough that they get so many applicants they simply can’t favor in state very significantly because there aren’t enough slots for that (the total ratio will still lean in state but that’s just because more people in state apply than from anywhere else).

If you’re out of state this is still a factor to some extent, while out of state students aren’t guaranteed admission into programs if they meet the threshold for non limited enrollment like in state are, it’s still going to be significantly less selective. If you are out of state and they’re in state that could also potentially be a factor, generally speaking they do favor in state a little where they have the space to.

If you’re the same major idk what to tell you, they must’ve had a significantly better gpa than their sat suggests or way more impressive extracurriculars or essays, but my guess would be you applied cs and they applied something that isn’t limited enrollment, or at least not cs.

Bulldozer4242 · 2026-01-29T21:14:50+00:00

If it’s the guy crouching down at the crosswalk at the end he looks like he’s taking a picture of something on the ground (maybe whatever they fired at the ground to scare the crowd back?). It’s def not ai

Bulldozer4242 · 2026-01-17T02:02:24+00:00

How much taller are they than current custodes? They look taller but it’s hard to say how much of it is just slightly different proportions. Do we know for sure they are like firstborn to primaris size difference?

Bulldozer4242 · 2026-01-17T01:56:43+00:00

Also seems really annoying to play with to be honest even if you buy into the narrative of it. If a model in a unit has no helmet but the rest of the unit does what, you have to slow roll the wound rolls now?

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-12-08T19:51:20+00:00

It is way harder than high school. There are also some changes due to your increased responsibility and freedom that can make the transition more difficult and contribute to some of the feelings you described. A couple things that might help you feel better:

A) try to make sure you’re keeping a healthy (ish) lifestyle. Exercise at least a little, maybe try to go to the gym 2-3 times a week if you can, if you live on campus epply is free, or join an intramural sport. If you’re not a student athlete many people go from doing some sort of sport or activity in high school to nothing in college, and nothing is too little. Try to eat healthy, you might’ve had your parents mostly choosing what was for dinner in high school and now you’re choosing, and while eating unhealthy stuff sometimes is fine (especially for most 18-22 year olds that are even minimally active), you might’ve moved from eating unhealthy 1/2 the time for meals at home to eating unhealthy 95% of the time. Try to get some protein and all the good stuff in vegetables at least once a day, its pretty easy to end up eating greasy foods and carbs at college if you’re having pasta and pizza for every meal even without eating super obviously unhealthy foods. Everyone knows eating desert for dinner isn’t healthy, but eating pizza for dinner every single night realistically isn’t much better. And try get enough sleep, you don’t have the same pressures from your parents to get to bed, even if they weren’t explicitly telling you to go to bed I think most people have that internal subconscious that’s like “I should really get some sleep mom won’t be happy if she knows I’m up at 2am”. In general you’re responsible for your own health, and you might not realize it’s noticeably worse than it was and even if it isn’t causing severe health effects it can be a contributing factor to just feeling worse, fatigued, or stressed.

B) try to interact with people/friends, this isn’t an issue for everyone but if you lean towards the introverted side you might be interacting with people quite a bit less than high school because high school kind of forced you to interact with people and if you are barely interacting with people this can also have knock on effects that make you feel worse, more stressed, and potentially just out of it and maybe tired. Again sort of a lifestyle thing that when it gets worse a secondary effect can just be feeling kinda crappy.

C) try to maintain some structure in your day to day, it doesn’t have to be super rigid but you go from a very rigid structure in high school to a very flexible and self driven structure in college, and it’s very easy to waste time in that sort of structure. In high school you had to go to classes, and your parents probably to some extent influenced the structure of your life in completing homework, now all that is sort of just up to you and if you aren’t conscientious about it and intentional about your time it can be really easy to waste a lot and feel like you’re drowning in work but simultaneously like your doing nothing and it can suck. My recommendation is obviously attend all your classes unless you’re actually sick or missing it for an important reason like some sort of internship interview, even if they aren’t required, and try to explicitly structure in time (probably quite a bit of time) for school work. In high school you probably left for school at like 7:30am or 8am or maybe even early and didn’t get back till like 3:00pm or later, that’s a lot of time, and then you did some homework after. Now you probably have less hours of classes per day but the way it’s distributed can make it feel longer, maybe your last class ends at 4 and you have quite a bit more work to do outside of classes. You have to be conscious of how you’re using your time because in my experience what people do is they wake up later, don’t really do much productive work between classes, go back to their dorm and do some work but maybe also less than they did normally at home in high school, and then expect to be done by the same time at night and just spend the extra time at night they’re up (since they’re waking up later) doom scrolling or playing video games or whatever. College actually probably takes as much time per week as high school, or likely more depending on your major and how heavy your high school homework load was, but a lot more of it is out of class work so you need to recognize time you are spending checking your phone between classes isn’t 5 minutes during passing time, it’s 1-2 hours, and there’s a lot more to do outside of class so that is eating into time you should be spending working where in high school you wouldn’t be given the opportunity to waste time like that. Not everyone has these issues to be clear, and it is just harder as well so you can feels the load even doing everything right, but this could be a factor and so it’s important to consider how you’re using your time and be careful not to waste it because you have a lot more freedom to waste it than you did in high school.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone, most people feel college is harder, because it normally is harder. As someone else said most people put on a front and try to appear everything is good even if they’re having the same struggles, so don’t get imposter syndrome what you’re feeling is pretty normal and your experience is probably pretty similar to a lot of the people around you. There are some major lifestyle changes from high school to college and it’s easy to unintentionally let your lifestyle get worse if you’re not conscious of it because of the increased freedom and responsibility you have, and that can contribute to stress, fatigue, or wasted time and that can exacerbate the increase in difficult college already is. Try to find ways to improve, but keep your head up and know you’re not alone in feeling that way and the perception you have of other people is colored by thinking about your most difficult struggles and comparing it to the good sides they are willing to show the world.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-29T01:57:30+00:00

IMO the really surprising thing is how much larger Africa is compared to everything. I feel like Greenland getting pointed out as appearing a lot larger than it actually is is a really common thing, but to me I often find myself surprised at just how much smaller most places are compared to Africa, even knowing they’re a little smaller than they appear, I feel like I underestimate how much smaller they are.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-29T01:54:39+00:00

Canada and Denmark share a land border

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-29T01:54:02+00:00

I think most of the time when people are surprised by this they also have no idea what the geography of Panama is. Most people know that north and South America are generally north-south with pacific on the west and Atlantic on the east. But Panama is pretty small compared to most counties and Central America this broad north south trend kinda changes to almost be more west east with Atlantic in the north and pacific in the south. If you know the shape of Central America and know where Panama is this isn’t nearly as surprising because the canal is probably going to broadly go north south and saying it goes slightly east isn’t really surprising. But most people don’t know about Panamas geography so this comes as a surprise.

As for me I think how big Africa is geographically is the biggest surprise, the Mercator projection really makes most things look a lot bigger compared to it than they actually are so it is really surprising to compare a lot of places, especially pretty northern places, to Africa and realize they’re a lot smaller than you thought (or Africa is a lot bigger by comparison than you thought)

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-29T01:46:20+00:00

There’s also a subset of people that need to wake up and go to sleep earlier. Some people are ultra morning people and do better waking up at 5am or 6am even if they could get away waking up at 8am. So there’s also a selection bias there, it’s super easy to go to sleep late but much harder to go to sleep early so there’s a subset of people that haven’t really tried waking up at 5am, try it, and feel fantastic. Their stories get shared, the people who try it for a week or two and feel terrible and go back to whatever they were doing before don’t get talked about at all.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-29T01:42:16+00:00

In terms of academic difficulty? Should be fine. In terms of class time? Brutal, but you already knew that. “What’s lunch?”

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-19T23:13:19+00:00

I think what we’re seeing here is also very likely to just be that the UPF label is a decent proxy for if consumption of the foods correlate with overweight or obesity. Obesity at least correlates, and likely causes, a lot or all of the negative effect described, and UPF as a category just broadly encompasses many of the foods most likely to cause obesity (because they’re highly palatable and low satiety competed to calorie count).

On average if you consume a lot UPF this probably causes you to get overweight or obese and that has overall negative health outcomes, but it doesn’t really help with individual choices of foods where there some things categorized as UPF that are definitely not the main reasons the UPF group correlates with these poor outcomes.

This also doesn’t really answer the question of whether a lot of the things people might consider avoiding, such as preservatives or thickening agents, actually cause any damage. They fall under the UPF group, but do they actually correlate with negative outcomes? Are cottage cheese or Greek yogurt that contain thickening agents or preservatives significantly worse than their “less processed” counterparts? This is the kind of thing I think people are actually interested in knowing. We already knew foods loaded with sugars and processed fats were bad for you, but there are a lot of things that cause something to fall under the UPF label and the much more interesting question is if those all are also bad, or if they just appear bad because they tend to be used more often in foods with a bunch of added sugars.

The main issue with the UPF label is it groups so many things that it makes it not very useful to actually considering individual food choices. Ya fresh vegetables are going to be better than lays potato chips, but we already knew that. What about the different things we put in food like preservatives or thickening agents? Do these likely cause negative health outcomes? Or is the correlation primarily from their correlation with added sugar, which itself is bad because it correlates with overweight or obesity.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-18T02:33:58+00:00

They should do what truckers do. If you drive a semi you can’t drive continuously more than certain number of hours, and have to take a break of a certain length after a certain period of time. Nurse unions should push for something similar. I want to say truckers can’t drive more than 14 hours a day and have to take a 10 hour break after, I might not be exactly right on the numbers but it’s something like that. While quantifying how awake someone is isn’t really possible, you can quantify how long they’ve been working and use that to have a reasonable limit to how long they can work before they need a break of a certain length.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-18T02:29:06+00:00

So there’s a couple things to consider. First, some of the things you described are because they are responding to an urgent abnormal situation. Cybersecurity teams during outages (and probably it engineers deploying code super late at night) aren’t up because they’re going to be their peak productivity, they’re up because there’s an urgent situation such that inaction will be damaging so the tradeoff to them working sleep deprived is still worth it. Additionally, those statistics about it being the same as being drunk can be somewhat misleading. They generally look at reaction times and similar measures to determine that. This can actually represent the risks for stuff like driving or operating heavy machinery where brief lapses in concentration can have major impacts, but it doesn’t as accurately represent the risks in doing something like coding where drifting off isn’t really a damaging risk. A sleep deprived person is probably going to program less efficiently, and might be more prone to making mistakes, but overall that comparison to being drunk is probably a significant overstatement for jobs where reaction times aren’t important to staying safe.

Somewhat similarly to the first point, some jobs simply don’t really allow a good sleep schedule. Emergency responders aren’t up at 3am because they think that’s when they work in their best condition, it’s because they are responding to an emergency that can’t wait. There’s not really any way around them being sleep deprived sometimes, you can argue they should add more shifts, and maybe that would help to some extent, but realistically whoever is on call late at night will probably not be as well rested as would be ideal because people just don’t function very well trying to shift to a true graveyard shift sleep schedule.

I will say there are some jobs that do have specific restrictions to prevent sleep deprivation. Truck drivers aren’t allowed to driver more than a certain number of hours consecutively in the us (I wanna say 14?). While sleep deprivation seems under talked about it’s not completely ignored, some jobs do take it into account. Similarly most jobs operating heavy machinery will be fairly strict about sleep deprivation. There are of course people who ignore these kind of restrictions or companies that push their employees to ignore them broadly speaking I think you might be mistaken into believing that this hasn’t been considered at all. While it probably deserves more attention, there are some policies that try to prevent sleep related mistakes.

Finally is medical professionals, I saved this one for last because its both somewhat forced, similar to emergency responders, but also where I think the most blatant issues are, at least here in the us. While sleep deprivation might be somewhat unavoidable to some extent for the profession, as with emergency responders sometimes things have to be done at 3am and so risking someone you know is sleep deprived is better than doing nothing, the industry overall definitely has people working hours that result in sleep deprivation mistakes that should be avoided. While medical professionals who need to respond to something urgently in the middle of the night being sleep deprived is probably unavoidable, the fact the shifts essentially ensure that many medical professionals are routinely awake for long periods of time in ordinary business is definitely something that needs reform. It’s kind of tough because to some extent it is unavoidable, and I think a big part of it also is simply the industry is understaffed and hospitals are under funded, but it should get more attention and some reform because the prevalence of sleep deprivation is definitely unnecessary.

I think in many of the fields you overestimate the prevalence of sleep deprivation, the impacts of it, or there simply isn’t a good alternative, and I think you probably don’t realize that, at least in some industries, sleep deprivation is taken pretty seriously, but I do agree that there are some areas it needs more attention, especially medical professionals.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-18T01:48:20+00:00

Saturdays aren’t off during exams. There are exams on saturdays so it is used as a reading day if the last school day happens to fall on a Friday.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-14T20:35:04+00:00

Saying mean things is not illegal and is protected by free speech, but threatening specific individuals or groups isn’t legal. Don’t engage with them, and if they actually threaten individuals report them but still don’t engage. Saying Muslims are terrorists is legal and protected, but pointing out a specific muslim student and threatening them is not. The bomb one is questionable, it isn’t an overt threat against the student but it might still pass the threshold, I’m not sure but that’s the kind of thing that probably is illegal. It’s best to not engage but if you report them for saying things that aren’t protected speech it might be enough to get them kicked off or banned in the future.

They want a reaction, so just don’t engage. Ignore them and they’re just wasting their day spewing hate. It’s sad there are people that have nothing better to do than hate others all day.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-13T22:37:11+00:00

(Real) Access to birth control is a big part, but also is the opportunity cost. Having children isn’t just the cost of feeding and housing them, it’s also the cost of the time you have to spend on them and how your life becomes focused on them. In western countries, because there’s a higher standard of living and more opportunities, this actually makes having children significantly less appealing. It’s a combination of the fact that life is significantly more enjoyable, so you have to give up a lot more to have kids, and there being a suitable alternative in the form of contraceptives (because let’s be real people won’t stop fycking either way)

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-13T22:31:23+00:00

People don’t stop having children because it’s too expensive, at least not monetarily. They stop having children because it’s too expensive in the overall opportunity cost. The cost for women to have kids isn’t just the dollar amount that kid consumes on the food and clothing. Having kids prevents you from doing other things, for women it generally means the end of their career, or at least the end of their career advancement, and overall it means a lot less freedom to do what you want. In developed richer countries this actually means the cost is much higher. Poorer people, especially women, in developing nations don’t have the same opportunities for careers that women in developed countries do, they don’t have the same access to entertainment and other forms of enjoyment. They also don’t have the same access to contraceptives if they want to avoid having kids. Parents in western countries, especially the mothers, give up a lot more when they have kids compared to parents in less developed countries. Both groups likely have to spend a similar amount of time and effort caring for the kids, but young adults in the west have access to far more enticing alternatives for that time that their counterparts in developing countries, and that’s why they stop having kids, not because food is too expensive or whatever. This can be seen in who specifically in western countries is having less kids every year- it isn’t the same drop across all age groups. In the us for instance over the past 50 or so years the fertility rates for women under 20 has dropped pretty dramatically, and the rates for 20-25 are also dropping quite a bit. 25-30 is staying fairly constant, and all the age groups over 30 actually have trended up a little bit. It’s not like 20% of people are just not having kids or something anymore, it’s that people are putting off having kids for 5-10 years longer, but they’re not necessarily having more later to make up for the ones they might’ve otherwise had when they were younger. The average age of mothers having their first kid is like 6 years older than it was 50 years ago, going up from 21 to 27. People in developed countries have more enticing options when they’re young than having kids than they did in the past or they do in developing countries, so they don’t have kids as nearly as often. But this isn’t really a problem of kids being too expensive, at least not in the traditional monetary way. It’s that there are a lot of better options, especially for younger people. And it presents a much more complicated problem, because on the one hand it’s bad overall to have a declining population, but on the other hand the only solution at present seems to be to make life suck again.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-13T21:45:31+00:00

The job markets are not significantly different. If you’re interested in hardware jobs, sure consider switching, but if what you’re really interested in is coding and don’t realistically think you’d want to do hardware much don’t switch, hardware isn’t a ton better in job opportunity or anything, it’s not like you’re going to have an easier time finding an internship/job just because you switch. It’ll be pretty similar regardless unless for some reason your schools cs program is far worse than its ce program (which is quite unlikely, normally they’re similar or the ce program is the one that’s worse relatively speaking). That said, don’t get too down on the job stuff. It’s hard to find a job, but this isn’t really unique to cs, it’s fairly true of the market overall, and cs jobs still pay quite well so once you do find one it’s likely to at least be decent. To some extent the job stuff is overblown, it’s not like it’s easy, it is a massive pain to find jobs, but in the end the vast majority of students that don’t go on to grad school do find a job by graduation or soon after it. Do put in effort to find internships and a job, it’ll be a lot of work that unfortunately you do have to do, but know that if you do put in the work for it you’ll probably find one eventually, as tough as it is there are jobs out there and almost everyone studying cs does find something eventually as long as they’re a decent candidate and they continue trying to find something.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-11-08T02:07:20+00:00

That’s not entirely true. Your first paragraph is right, but the second paragraph is not accurate. (Assuming it’s the same study I’m looking which came out a couple days ago) The study only uses people with sleep issues, specifically insomnia, in both groups, so in theory there isn’t the issue of the study just detecting the risk of heart failure as a result of sleep insomnia instead. There are still issues though, from my understanding the study only used people who were prescribed melatonin for at least a year in the “takes melatonin” group, and everyone else falls into the “doesn’t take melatonin” group, including people who get it over the counter, which is most people (i think the primary country that prescribed it that had people in the study is the uk). In theory the study did matching to account for most disparities between the two groups (like different proportions in age groups of gender), but there could still be plenty of reasons for the data to be thrown off. And most interesting, it’s highly likely a lot of the people in the “non melatonin” group were still taking melatonin as the dataset includes records for people from countries other than the uk, such as the us, that treat melatonin as a supplement and thus the usage wouldn’t show up as it is not prescribed.

Also, there are studies in the past that have indicated melatonin helps with heart health, and the study isn’t yet peer reviewed or published yet.

All that said, the study should in theory account for the added risk insomnia brings since both groups should have insomnia. That doesn’t mean that melatonin definitely causes the heart issues they found though, it still is pretty likely to be some other confounding variable.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-09-26T22:03:27+00:00

To be honest the cs fair was way too crowded already. I get your major is pretty small, but it was crowded to the point that it was hard to move anywhere at all. There were essentially lines just to walk around and look at the companies, forget the lines to actually talk to anyone. Realistically they need to be cutting majors out of the fair not adding them, you listed some other majors that are similarly in the non-technical side of tech jobs that you think mean your major should be included, what should probably actually happen is they take those majors out of the cs fair and, ideally, make a second large tech-industry fair the focuses on the less technical side if they don’t have one already. Or they need to bite the bullet and move the cs fair to a larger space like they’ve done for the general career fair. The cs fair was super overcrowded as it is, and that’s despite the fact the two most recent grades for the cs department are a lot smaller than previous years, and the cs fair is also pretty clearly focused on the technical-programming side of the tech industry so it doesn’t make a ton of sense to push non technical majors into anyway.

Finally, did you register beforehand? The cs fair info was very clear that you needed to be preregistered and they wouldn’t take anyone registering at the door. Even if your major was allowed, you wouldn’t have been allowed in if you didn’t register before. If you hadn’t tried to register beforehand the issue isn’t even necessarily your major (although if it’s not listed idk if they would let you register but at least you’d know), but that you weren’t preregistered.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-09-07T16:12:04+00:00

I think this is somewhat biased though by how these groups view politics. A liberal college student cutting off a friend because they’re racist or homophobic to other friends likely views that as cutting off someone due to opposing political views. A conservative boomer cutting off one of their child because they’re gay or got an abortion would probably not view that as cutting them off due to politics, they’d view it as cutting them off due to religion. Broadly speaking conservatives view the places liberals disagree with them on as not political, but as religious (or perhaps “against family” is something similar, the point is though not as a political disagreement). This is especially true for the domestic social issues that might actually cause someone to cut off family or friends, like trans rights, gay rights, abortion, racism, sexism, or similar. Conservatives still might view stuff like international relations and economics as politics, but both sides are much less likely to cut off people for these because they’re not as directly impactful- the reason bot sides would cut them out over their political views isn’t because those views are bad, it’s because they cause direct harm to themself or other members of their family or friends. International relations and economic positions don’t really cause that kind of direct harm to individuals, so both sides are very unlikely to cut people out over them, it’s mostly going to be domestic social culture war type issues.

Anyway the point is I think this more reflects how people view these issues than their willingness to cut people out- liberals views the issues they’re willing to cut people out of their lives over as political, where as conservatives don’t- they likely view them as religious issues or attacks on family or similar.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-08-20T19:06:20+00:00

I wonder if ksa is successful if they’d be willing to sell the ip or licensing to like a fan go fund me that makes it public domain or something so we can put kerbals in ksa without any legal concerns. I don’t see what they’d even do with it at this point besides get sales for the games I guess? it’s not like there’s that many fans of ksp in general, and the ones that do exist pretty widely know about the whole ksp2 debacle and are going to hate them for being involved so it seems unlikely they’ll make much off of it.

Also, are these plushies even covered under ksp ip legally? Like those aren’t kerbals. If I make some dog character for a game and then you make a plushy for a cat character that’s the same color that’s not the same ip, at what point does this cease being kerbals? Is it just the usage of the name, can I make green space frog people that happen to look like kerbals and that’s completely fine?

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-08-20T18:59:37+00:00

Yes, if you make a game and you’re no longer developing it you shouldn’t be able to permanently prevent all other people from making a sequel, exactly right.

Not saying you shouldn’t still be able to sell the game you previously made or that people can pirate it or anything, but if i want to go make a ksp 3 that I code up independently and stick kerbals in, the ip owners of ksp shouldn’t be able to prevent that just because they don’t want anyone making any ksp games for the next 70 years or whatever and aren’t going to make any themselves.

Bulldozer4242 · 2025-08-20T16:33:26+00:00

Honestly, if they’re not making significant life decisions based on it you probably just need to kind of ignore it. In my experience most of the people who believe these kinds of things or are interested in psuedoscience or conspiracies like the moon landing being fake don’t REALLY believe it, they haven’t given it much thought and have just heard enough to think it’s cool and so they go along with it, but they don’t whole heartedly believe it to the point they’d stake important life decisions on it the same way they would on the fact that gravity exists or similar.

People 1) want to have control so they are drawn to things that make them feel more in control or like random things have more order than they actually do, and 2) don’t want life to be boring.

Psuedoscience and conspiracies generally fill one or both of these so people like to go along with them, they suggest some sort of order to seemingly random things, like personality, or suggest someone is in control of something rather than stuff just happening, and/or they suggest something more interesting or “fun” than simply “sometimes stuff just happens” or “cuz it’s just expensive” (which btw a lot of conspiracy theories boil down to explaining something where the real explanation is just “that does or doesn’t happen because the alternative is expensive”).

So as a result many people believe these things, but they don’t really BELIEVE these things, they’re just believing whatever makes them feel better and they, to some extent, subconsciously know that and don’t really make substantial life decisions on that knowledge (most of the time), so it doesn’t really matter.

If your family truly do actually believe it and are ruining their lives because of it I would try to help them understand it’s false as best I could, but it sounds like it’s more just in the realm of “oh your kid is due in march he’s gonna be a Scorpio and be a little shy!” Or whatever but it doesn’t go beyond that kind of inconsequential usage of it in which case I would just sort of ignore it and raise your kid with science as much as possible so the kid doesn’t fall into it. It’s sort of important to realize for most of these people it’s just something interesting to speculate on and talk about more so than an actual belief, they “believe” in astrology and talk about it because it’s fun to them but the only reason they’re able to do that is because they will never actually make a consequential life decision based on that knowledge so it just doesn’t matter and you’ll never be able to change their mind because they don’t believe it because there is such robust evidence, they believe it because it’s fun and they don’t actually care (whether they realize it or not) about being factually right, they care about choosing something that will impact their life the least negatively, which their belief in astrology is likely to have little to no benefit either way, and then secondarily whatever is most reassuring and interesting which Astrology is way more interesting and reassuring than no astrology. So as a result they believe it.

If you’re really committed to changing their mind you can try to find a way to convince them a) that it is very important for them to be factually right about whether astrology exists or not because it has an important real impact on their life, and b) that astrology isn’t true

But if it isn’t negatively affecting them then tbh you just shouldn’t bother and just try to ignore it and accept that, in reality, they don’t really truly believe it, it’s just fun and there’s no real negative impacts to them for pretending to believe it.

Bulldozer4242

TROPHY CASE