What It Shows
This infographic maps out frequently used words across horoscopes for all astrological signs, highlighting their apparent similarity.
Why It’s Good
As is always the case with Information is Beautiful, and true to their names, even this fairly drab-colored infographic is nice to look at. The color palette works, and the graphics are crispy as ever.
A horoscope is written by a person, after all, and they are likely to draw from the same pool of words, so this is one way to attempt to expose the potential falsity of it all. But the experiment is flawed…
What It’s Missing
The problem with this is that context is everything for a word. Words on their own have significantly less meaning. If one sign’s horoscope said “eat more” and another sign’s said “don’t eat more”, both would flag “eat”. Never mind negatives, word order matters too. Plus, a lot of the common words are words like “keep”. Keep what? If one horoscope says keep something and another says keep something else, the fact that they share the word keep doesn’t tell you anything. If anything, a common language style for the in-betweens would make things easier to digest, whether it’s 2012 or 2112.
This infographic was created by Information is Beautiful and is available here.
