Well, I always say, “whatever works”.
And, with astrology, all one need do is to believe in it. Or, sure, not believe in it but able to convince others to believe in it. It’s like God. The truth about Him need not be relevant if any particular human behaviors are predicated on the belief that He does or does not exist. The consequences are still the same.
It all comes down to a particular war in a particular set of circumstances and who has the greater knowledge of what those circumstances actually are. If the stars and/or God can be used to achieve your objective, then, here, you are willing to be either more or less cynical about it.
Of course defending the means is one thing, defending the ends another thing altogether. Them is where the components of my own argument come into play.
Similarly, astrology might be beneficial where it injects beneficial randomness into people’s lives. In addition to making them more daunting foes in prisoners dilemmas, it may force them to take slightly more risk or to explore slightly farther from what they would otherwise explore, and those divergences will pay off in many contexts.
With the prisoner’s dilemma, it depends on who the prisoners are in relationship to the other prisoners. The calculations here are often anything but “analytical”.
And “randomness” with astrology seems particularly problematic. Are the stars and the moons and the planets “in place” because there is some teleological component in the universe that brings all of this about? Or, instead, is it all just embedded in some mysterious “force”…a reality “out there” that makes it so for entirely – largely? – unfathomable reasons?
And then that existential gap between the heavens propelling you to choose as opposed to compelling you to choose. That mysterious instance when “I” makes or breaks a particular outcome.
Somewhat paradoxically, another benefit could be that it crystallizes intuitions that might not otherwise rise to the level of action. A vaguely worded horoscope that someone interprets as talking about the very thing they’ve been struggling to make up their mind about can push them to the conclusion that they would have made anyway sooner, which is almost always better (if it’s right, you get compounding returns; if it’s wrong, you fail faster and move on sooner).
And, again, the beauty of it all is that, for any particular individual, it doesn’t matter what he or she can or must know about any of this, but what he or she simply believes they know about it.
And, me, I’m willing to keep an open mind. If they are able to demonstrate that what they believe about it is true, it’s got to be a hell of a lot more “comforting and consoling” then what I have come to believe I think I know about what’s left of my own essentially meaningless existence.