Not so long ago, just as I was about to set off on a cross-country drive, a friend emailed me to warn me to drive carefully. Unfortunately, the email arrived just as I was shutting down the computer so I never got to ask what the problem was.

Anyway, I somehow made it safely to my destination and got to ask what the issue was in person. Turns out the problem was in the heavens. Venus and Jupiter were both in the same house. Something like that. Two of the planets that shouldn’t have been where they were.

The scariest part was that she believed it. That the convergence of the two planets was going to cause gridlock on the roads of Britain. And I assume everywhere else.

I checked the papers the following morning, but it seemed like the forewarning had paid off. That was her thinking anyway. To my mind she was in a Popperian ‘no lose’ situation  If there had been carnage on the roads, her prediction was right; if there wasn’t it was because the forewarnings paid off. Heads astrology won, tails I lost.

In my mind, bringing matters back to Earth for a second, the ‘drive safely’ warning was a bit like safety legislation. Which for the most part these days has exactly the opposite of its intended effect. Telling people to hold onto the handrails when they go down a flight of stairs, it turns out, is a great way to ensure that more people fall down flights of stairs. Telling people to pull over to the side of the road if they feel sleepy is a great way to ensure more drivers end up snoozing their way into a car-wreck.

Investigators and legislators, sadly, find themselves in rock-and-hard place positions when these kinds of thing go wrong in society. They’re under pressure to do something whenever they investigate an accident or an incident. Usually, the easiest thing they can do is to add more legislation or instruct that warning signs are put in place. Or more labelling on packaging. And so on until we’re all of us completely surrounded by cotton wool exhortations to be more careful.

The first problem with this strategy is the investigation team, as far as I can tell, have little or no understanding of the difference between special and common cause problems. Nor the idea that if we mix the two up any response we design will have the opposite impact to what we intended. Treat a special cause problem as common cause and you make the system worse. Treat a common cause problem as special and you fail to change a dysfunctional system. Either way, irrespective of whether the legislators understand common and special causes or not, the population at large almost definitely don’t. Which means that the legislators have to be seen to be doing something irrespective of whether the situation is special or common.

That ends up being a recipe for a great downward spiral for society because the even bigger problem is that what happens when we’re bombarded with safety information all the time is that we become collectively more anxious. And if there’s one thing to guarantee more accidents and unwanted incidents it’s a population full of anxious people. The downward spiral looks something like this:

Astrology, meanwhile, is yet more anxiety-causing bunkum. The reason deluded friends continue to believe our future is written in the heavens is predominantly about confirmation bias. The actual reason Pisceans (or whichever Sign it is – I can’t be bothered to look up the statistics) are more ‘accident-prone’, for example, is because they’re more anxious than other star signs. And the reason they’re more anxious is because they continually get told by other astrology-delusionals that they’re more accident-prone.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh here. Maybe the position of Venus in the sky really does have a genuine impact on our lives like the Moon actually does. I’m open to the possibility. Or at least I am if I can be shown an experiment where all of the other related effects – confirmation bias, etc – are properly controlled for.

If I had to assemble a theory based on what we know so far prior to such experiments, if I wanted to be generous to astrology I might hypothesise that the position of Venus has a 0.000001% effect on me crashing my car this afternoon. The likelihood of me crashing my car because a friend tells me to be careful, meanwhile, based on actual scientific evidence relating to the effect of anxiety on errors, will increase by around 5000 times that amount. The anxiety caused by being told to drive carefully, in other words, is about 5000 times more potent as a cause of accidents than the orbital position of Venus.

Which, all in all means, maybe the legislators might start decreasing the rate of harm they’re currently causing if they spent more time reading horoscopes and less time designing counter-productive signs. Or something like that.