Predictions of Astrologers

This is a story idea.

I just read where Robert Burton, an English philosopher and Novelist during the early 1600s, committed suicide for the silly reason that his astrological charts indicated that he would die on a certain day. He wanted the charts to be correct and could not suffer the humiliation of having made an erroneous prediction.

This could be incorporated into a story in several ways. You could predict someone's death and the person would comply for any number of reasons. You could predict that someone who hates astrology will live a long life and he commits suicide to prove the astrologer wrong. You can come up with variations of murder by prediction such as provide an astrologer with doctored ephemeris (tables of star positions).

It would not have to be astrology. Suppose a programmer had a program that was uncanny at predicting certain kinds of events - elections or oil prices, etc. What if the programmer began to alter the output of the program to manipulate the reaction to the predictions - kind of an information theory Heisenberg principle.