More on my claim to the JREF $1 Million Paranormal Challenge

[avataress]

As requested my claim as parsed in conversations with Loss Leader privately w/addenda

In honor of the late Michel Gauquelin, who was hounded to death (he committed suicide), if what I hear is true, by those who faked their information, more on who these people and urls where I have read about the whole debacle, if you ask (to follow as promised in the other thread), I would like to try to prove with a whole new set of data, the statistical claims that Michel Gauquelin put forward about certain astrological or horoscopic patterns being (very) statistically significant among certain professions, like famous athletes and medical doctors.

(This means that scientifically speaking, it seems that somehow the placements of certain of the planets has a large statistically significant effect on at least career success in certain fields like professional athletics in this case; since Loss Leader has said this is too broad a sample, I have decided to try to statistically prove the significance of certain astrological positions at birth in the case of professional athletes, if not famous athletes, which term, "famous" Loss Leader also balks at saying that "fame" is too subjective to scientifically determine, although we could set criteria such as professional athletes who belong to professional athletics teams; there's no question there! See Loss Leader's comments in further posts.)

I will only use birth data, meaning, month, day, year, city, state, and country, and time of birth, e.g., 1 am, 3:15 pm, 12:23 pm, etc. as the case may be that is the most accurate in the field of astrology, namely Lois Rodden's AA, Accurate Accurate information, consisting of a Birth Certificate or Birth Record, see here:

http://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Help:RR

Lois Rodden's Astro-Databank is legendary in the field!

(Loss Leader also balks at this saying we cannot get enough accuracy in the birth data, although this is the most accurate there is anywhere and all we have to do, again, is define the terms of what we will accept as accurate in the protocol. I think what I'm saying is totally fair and feasible!)

Among many of my other accomplishments, I have been studying and using astrology as an autodidact for 45 years or since I was 12. I'm very familiar with the symbolism and can very easily inform any statistician on what to look for. There are thousands of cases worldwide for us to use.

Thank you for your continued interest. Any further questions, please let me know! !

Loss Leader's first set of comments and my rebuttal with further comments I will post in another post.

 

[avataress]

Avatress -

I suppose your interest in astrology is as fine a hobby as any other. However, analyzing statistics is not any sort of paranormal claim that a skeptical organization would accept. For one thing, the list of who might qualify as a famous athlete or doctor is very subjective. One could expand or shrink the data pool to find any desired correlation. For another thing, it is well known that most major athletes are born in the earliest months of the year.

(They can be a full year ahead of other children in little league, which singles them out for more extensive coaching, which causes a love of the game, which causes them to work harder and achieve professional status.)

The type of claim that a skeptic organization would test would be to say: give you the birth information for ten people, then have you write about each person, and then see if they could each pick out their chart. Correspondingly, you could be given a biography of several volunteers and asked if you could match it with their birth information.

Here are the details of one such test: http://www.skepsis.nl/astrot.html

It appears that Gauquelin's claims have already been extensively studied and his findings cannot be repeated. Some of the problems included an indefinite sample size (as I said earlier), a very small statistical significance easily swamped by any margin of error, misreporting by parents and more.

Furthermore, it looks like a study of sufficient size to be of any use would be a tremendous undertaking.

I doubt that you will find any mathematician anywhere that would be interested in such a large project.

Althought I do not speak for the JREF or any other organization, I doubt that this would be accepted as a testable claim.

Best of luck with your interests.

- Loss Leader
I have heard of the statistics you state about most exceptional athletes having been born earlier in the year than their less successful counterparts and hence being a year ahead, getting better training, encouragement, etc., which stands to reason, although I have no interest whatsoever in any professional or sophmoric sports activities and not much more knowledge of them either. I read about this study, as you may have, in Malcolm Gladwell's, Tour de force entitled, Outliers, which I have just ordered another copy of coincidentally and am waiting for it to arrive in the mail, because I found it incredibly fascinating and wanted to recheck some points, and I stupidly gave my, what seems to be a collector or at least very expensive hardcover copy, although I only paid 1 cent plus $3.99 shipping at the time as I did for most of the books I bought used, if I remember correctly, to an old work colleague who didn't even bother to read it because it would not show her (non-existent) intellectual superiority to me which she tried to show by being disrespectful and nasty to me repeatedly until I had to break off our friendship, which I'm sure you're not interested in, but which is how most behave when they find they can't best me intellectually! For the life of me I don't see how being rude and sarcastic (and mean) proves one intellectually superior or superior in any way. Especially Ph.D.s like Leonard Mlodinow who wrote, The Drunkard's Walk, which I have read and re-read many times and which you may also know about or have read.

However, the point you make about the time of year of birth of many exceptional athletes being the only or major key at least astrologically shows that you do not share my almost half a century long "hobby" (!) of studying and practicing astrology! Further most people who think they know something about Sun Signs, which is what one refers to when one talks of the time or month of year of one's birth most astrologers of my long-lived "hobby" also look down upon as superficial. These people invariably talk what they think is knowledgeably to ME about what they think they know as does just about everyone else about just about everything! And it is NOT what Gauquelin's research proved at all! Further what I saw of Gauquelin's statistics was NOT a small statistical significance at all! (It was a very large statistical significance, indeed!)

If I may, may I give you a short language of astrology lesson, or astrologese? Without waiting for your permission, I will do so: First of all, there ARE 12 signs of the zodiac which most know only as Sun Signs, which means the sign in the which the Sun in the Tropical Zodiac ecliptic was posited at the time of one's birth, which speaks to the time of year one is born, i.e., in the winter and early spring, I would presume in the case of said exceptional athletes we are talking about. Said athletes Sun Signs would be posited in the zodiac signs Capricorn or Aquarius in January, Aquarius or Pisces in February and/or Pisces or Aries in March. Gauquelin's statistical proofs have absolutely NOTHING to do with that! (Namely Sun Sign astrology; the first bastion of the ignorant about astrology, as I hope I have made clear above, although I too started with Sun Signs at age 12 (!) with Linda Goodman's book, Sun Signs.)

Further, there are 10 planets (in the Tropical Zodiac), which include the Sun and the Moon and up to Pluto in our solar system although for astronomical purposes, the Sun, the Moon, and now Pluto do not count as planets. Humor me on this, if you will. So, so far, that's 22 "letters" in our astrologese/astrological alphabet, (namely) the 12 Sun Signs, all of which I have not mentioned here, but that is very easy to look up if you don't know (what they are) and the ten planets of the solar system, which for our purposes include the Sun, the Moon and Pluto.

My reply was too long. Please see the remainder in a second reply following this one. I will have to copy and paste and put my reply on a word document and recopy it to my second reply. Thanks for your forbearance although you should receive both replies almost simultaneously.

 

[avataress]

Page two

Although some of those planets can only be in certain signs at certain times of the year in Tropical Astrology, e.g., the Sun can only be in certain signs depending on what month of the year it is, but then the Moon traverses through all the signs each and every month. Also, Mercury can never be more than 28 degrees away from the Sun and Venus can never be more than 45 degrees away from the Sun even astronomically, if I'm not mistaken, even including their apparent retrograde motion, which scientific anomaly I don't think I have to explain to you.

However, Mars, one of the factors considered in Gauquelin's statistical findings can be anywhere at any time of the year. And for the Coup de grace:

There are 12 houses in a zodiacal or horoscope wheel giving us another 12 letters of the astrological alphabet bringing us up to 34. There are many more "letters" in the astrologese alphabet like angles or aspects, fixed stars, The Part of Fortune, The North and South Nodes, the asteroids, etc. However, the houses (or the 12 divisions of the horoscope chart) and the planet Mars are the most pertinent here in Gauquelin's research, which former are determined by the time of day one is born, e.g., 1am, 10 pm, 12:23 pm,etc., and the place on Earth where one is born which is determined by latitude and longitude and, as I'm sure you can agree, said time can be anytime within the 24 hours a day we all have and would determine what planets are rising or culminating, the former meaning rising above the horizon of the horoscopic circle on the left side of the circle (East and West are reversed in a horoscopic circle because it is flat; to remedy this one need only hold the paper it is drawn on above one's head; the earth is dead center in the circle) the latter meaning at the very top of the horoscopic circle.

Therefore, even if one is born at the same time of the year as someone else, and even a year earlier, depending on the time of day of birth and the earthly longitude and latitude of one's birth very different planets may and probably will be in the rising and culminating positions at those respective times, which is where Gauquelin's statistics come in. I have some of those statistics in his book on biological (called cosmic, I believe) clocks and, as I said above, those statistics are nowhere near negligible; nowhere near!

I could produce those, but I am not here to justify them because I don't know if they are true or correct. I only know that I believe that Gauquelin was hounded until he felt it necessary to commit suicide and that many so called "scientists" would be despicable enough to do so and HAVE done so, repeatedly, throughout the history of scientific advancement, like those who hounded the scientist who first put forth germ theory and the female scientist who was the first to come up with the DNA double helix and who was not included in the Nobel Prize of Watson and Crick although they knew it was she who "first" discovered it scientifically in modern times (although the ancient double serpent entwined staff that represents the medical profession, the Caduceus, quite clearly graphically (pictorially with an image) represents the principle of the DNA Double Helix, as someone was good enough to point out to me on another forum completely independent of Skeptics International; but that was probably a quaint hobby of the ancients!)

About the undertaking of the statistical analysis of famous athletes and physicians, we can figure out a protocol of what WILL BE an acceptable claim to being a famous (or professional) athlete past and present (it doesn't matter when the athlete lived or whether s/he is still living only if s/he belonged to a professional team like Olympians, etc. and his or her birth data can be found to fit into our agreed criteria of dependable accuracy as we will have in our protocol; race and nationality also do not matter, this giving us a wider scope to decide on how many samples we will use) to us for the purposes of this study, and what WILL BE suitably accurate birth data, and how many we need to find our studies statistically significant (which even if it is in the thousands, Astro-databank has very many examples there and we I'm sure we could easily find as many samples as we need!) As any philosopher, as any scientist worth his or her salt knows, the first thing one needs to do in any logical debate or scientific experiment is define one's terms!

Further, there are very few things to look for in each horoscope, just in how many Mars is rising over the eastern horizon at birth or culminating at the top of the chart at birth according to the birth data whose accuracy we will have agreed to accept. We don't need to know anything else! Some of these numbers may already be recorded on Astro-databank. All that we would need is to verify that the information is so. I'll do that myself and a statistician can compile statistics from how many there are that fall into our category, etc. (I will also ask that the JREF waive the condition that I have to produce one of their three verifications according to the following statement in the application criteria because I don't think there is professional or medical doctor formally employed in the field of statistics, actuary, mathematics who would be an expert enough on such to legitimately give me a reference that my claim is valid. Further, I am not published on this subject in particular by any outside agency although I have been published twice in the famous magazines the Mountain Astrologer and Dell Horoscope, both in 2005, in their Feb./Mar. and May issues, respectively on how some of the tenet's of Carl Jung's school of thought may correlate with some astrological theories. The names of those articles are, "Saturn and the Shadow," and "Jung's Psychological Types and Astrology," respectively.

"The JREF may choose to waive any step in the application, protocol development, or Preliminary Test process, in order to make it easier for serious claims to be tested." (This is directly quoted from the JREF challenge application criteria.)

So, this does not seem to be that large an undertaking, and if YOU don't help me to find a statistician, actuary, or mathematician who will try to undertake it, then I certainly intend to! (Later, Loss Leader said he can't help with this, which I never believed s/he could or would!)

If you (Loss Leader) have anything further to say, I will be glad to hear it. I will be revealing the substance of these communications here with you on Thursday, May 14, 2015 (I decided to do it two days earlier on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 because of Loss Leader's what I thought to be, frivolous replies; see his last reply in my next post along with my comments) in public to the Science, etc. forum on Skeptics International. If you do not want anything further that you say to be revealed there, then I suggest you do not respond any further. I did not agree to keep them secret! Proceed at your own risk!

Loss Leader's last response and my comments to follow in my next post here.

 

[avataress]

Final post of this series for now

Loss Leader's last reply

Avataress -

I am sure your interest in astrology is quite fascinating to you. I, however, do not care one bit about it. (I also believe he doesn't UNDERSTAND what I said one bit, although I proved that I understood all he said by the coherency of my rebuttals to what he said!) As I have said, I doubt that a retrospective statistical analysis would be accepted by any skeptic organization as a testable paranormal claim. (I didn't say I wanted to do a "retrospective statistical analysis" if I understand what Loss Leader means by that term, namely trying to prove my case using the exact statistical data that Gauquelin used, which is NOT what I'm proposing although I WOULD be using what's come to be known as "The Mars effect.")

I know of nobody with a math background who might be interested in such a project.

Feel free to divulge the entire contents of my PMs. I learned long ago never to say anything in private that you wouldn't shout from the rooftops.

- Loss Leader


I did not respond to this private message except here to you all. I await your comments.

 

[Agatha]

Is your claim that more famous athletes are born at certain times of the year? If so, are you restricting this to the USA, or to the Northern hemisphere, or does this hold good for the whole world?

Or is your claim something else?

By the way, discussions to get the basics of a claim nailed down and to develop a protocol for testing generally go into the 'General Skepticism and the Paranormal' subforum (GS&P) so don't be surprised if your thread gets moved to there.

Nobody on the forum speaks for the JREF, but there are many people with experience of understanding claims to the point where there is something testable, and developing a protocol for doing so. Generally, people will be as helpful as they can be (though this is an open forum and some people may dismiss your claim with varying degrees of politeness; as long as they stay within the rules this is allowed).

It is important to understand that the JREF challenge is to demonstrate, under controlled conditions, something that science cannot explain. If your claim is that more famous athletes than would be expected by chance are born at certain times of the year (especially if you limit this to the USA or to the northern hemisphere), that may well be explicable by science because of the way that youth teams and academic years are arranged by age.

However, if your claim involves something else, then please do explain.

 

[MikeG]

Loss Leader's last reply

Avataress -

I am sure your interest in astrology is quite fascinating to you. I, however, do not care one bit about it. (I also believe he doesn't UNDERSTAND what I said one bit, although I proved that I understood all he said by the coherency of my rebuttals to what he said!) As I have said, I doubt that a retrospective statistical analysis would be accepted by any skeptic organization as a testable paranormal claim. (I didn't say I wanted to do a "retrospective statistical analysis" if I understand what Loss Leader means by that term, namely trying to prove my case using the exact statistical data that Gauquelin used, which is NOT what I'm proposing although I WOULD be using what's come to be known as "The Mars effect.")

I know of nobody with a math background who might be interested in such a project.

Feel free to divulge the entire contents of my PMs. I learned long ago never to say anything in private that you wouldn't shout from the rooftops.

- Loss Leader


I did not respond to this private message except here to you all. I await your comments.

For someone who claims to be more intelligent than anyone on the entire forum (see quote below), it seems a little odd that you haven't yet worked out how to use the quote function.

.........they simply do not like, like someone, just about anyone being, more intellectually gifted than they are! Especially not an African-American woman....

........
2) I don't know very many people whose intellectual capacity matches or surpasses my own and I have come across few in my lifetime and I have a very wide acquaintance of the highest and the lowest and those in reputation for greatness as well as superior intellect. Certainly no one on this forum!

..........There are so many other things I have to do that ARE important that I will get to doing, like competing for the Pulitzer, yet again, with my book of poetry, and many others!........

 

[Pup]

There's a disclaimer in the financial field that past sucess is no guarantee of future performance, and I think that's the problem here. Given birth information for people who've already become famous, one can keep massaging the data until one has a foolproof indicator of success, just as stock analysts can look at past charts and figure out just exactly what has come before a big move up or down. And it's all statistically true and provable--for the past. Nothing paranormal or unusual about that. People who enjoy pattern-seeking love doing this sort of thing.

The rub is in using it to predict the future. That's the paranormal aspect. Most people don't believe that a person can take birth data for two children born a few days apart and predict, at birth, that one will become a famous athlete, or doctor, or whatever, and one won't.

Unfortunately, the JREF won't want to wait 30 years for a cohort of babies to grow up, so there will need to be a way to show that such a prediction is possible, in a shorter time.

I think a test where you're given birth data for people who have already grown up to be famous, without their names, and you identify the famous ones at a rate far greater than chance, would work, if the following things could be defined so they're indisputable.

What's famous and not famous? No judging or subjectivity to be disputed afterwards--this would need to be crystal clear and agreed ahead of time. For example, Olympic athletes. But one can't say that so-and-so qualified but had to drop out with a broken leg, so he should have counted, or so-and-so humiliated himself with a terrible Olympic performance so he shouldn't have counted. Whatever the criteria is, it needs to be agreed on without any subjectivity.

Also, the accuracy of the birth data. If it comes from a particular database and that's agreed to be defined as accurate, great, but non-famous people will probably be providing their own birth certificates.

And then there's the problem that if you already are familiar with or can back-search famous athletes' births, how can there be a guarantee against cheating? It would be possible to search whether any Olympian was born at a certain day, place and time, for example, since if the JREF can come up with that information, so can anyone.

So there would need to be enough dates and limited access to computers or communication with anyone with a computer, so that the JREF was comfortable you couldn't back-search the dates or just be familiar with them. For example, one could memorize the birth data for all the Nobel prize winners in medicine and pick them out of a list, but probably not the data for everyone who had ever competed in the Olympics.

Those are some general thoughts, but I think the first step is defining a paranormal claim that really is paranormal. The JREF isn't interested in a non-paranormal thing with a paranormal explanation added on.

For example: These famous people all have this in common and it's due to astrology, or fairies or gods. Not a paranormal claim--people do have things in common if one looks hard enough. But this is paranormal: I can predict people's future using this data that has no known correlation with their future. That is paranormal, whether one claims it's done with astrology, pendulum or ouija board.

 

[marplots]

Is the claim going to be something like: I can predict, at a level greater than chance, whether someone will be an athlete?

 

[Agatha]

It occurs to me that not all countries record the time of birth on their birth certificates, so that may cause a problem if the exact time of birth is a necessary component of the study. Self-reported times rely on memory of parents who may well have died, and second-hand data from the subjects.

 

[Agatha]

<snip>

I could produce those, but I am not here to justify them because I don't know if they are true or correct. I only know that I believe that Gauquelin was hounded until he felt it necessary to commit suicide and that many so called "scientists" would be despicable enough to do so and HAVE done so, repeatedly, throughout the history of scientific advancement, like those who hounded the scientist who first put forth germ theory and the female scientist who was the first to come up with the DNA double helix and who was not included in the Nobel Prize of Watson and Crick although they knew it was she who "first" discovered it scientifically in modern times.

<snip>

Just as a point of information, Rosalind Franklin wasn't awarded the Nobel Prize along with Watson, Crick and Wilkins because she had died from ovarian cancer in 1958, and the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1962. Nor was she awarded a Nobel Prize along with Klug when he won a Nobel in 1982 for work which she had contributed much, because Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously.

Whilst it is undoubtedly true that many of her male colleagues and Watson in particular failed to take her sufficiently seriously, Watson did in the end acknowledge that had she lived, she would have shared the Nobel Prize awarded to him, Crick and Wilkins, and the Prize awarded to Klug.

 

[The Don]

Regarding athletic performance vs. birth date, this has been researched extensively and it has been shown that, on average, people born earlier in the year for that particular sport tend to perform better on average. There's no great mystery, throughout age group competition, the ones born earlier tend to perform better because they are older and hence tend to be bigger and stronger.

In the case of football it tends to be people born between August and December

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2011/jun/19/fa-plans-age-group-football

A similar effect is noted in academic acheivement.

 

[marplots]

Regarding athletic performance vs. birth date, this has been researched extensively and it has been shown that, on average, people born earlier in the year for that particular sport tend to perform better on average. There's no great mystery, throughout age group competition, the ones born earlier tend to perform better because they are older and hence tend to be bigger and stronger.

In the case of football it tends to be people born between August and December

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2011/jun/19/fa-plans-age-group-football

A similar effect is noted in academic acheivement.

The issue could be reawakened if the claim is granular enough. So, for example, if I made the athletics claim and discriminated between March 10th at 6pm and March 11th at 8am.

What troubles me is that, without a theory and strict formalism, the way we find these statistical anomalies (look through the past data) and the way we test them (look through the past data) is the same. That's a problem, unless data sets can be kept quarantined, or we are willing to wait decades for a new crop of babies to grow up.

 

[skeptichaggis]

In honor of the late Michel Gauquelin, who was hounded to death (he committed suicide), if what I hear is true, by those who faked their information, more on who these people and urls where I have read about the whole debacle, if you ask (to follow as promised in the other thread), I would like to try to prove with a whole new set of data, the statistical claims that Michel Gauquelin put forward about certain astrological or horoscopic patterns being (very) statistically significant among certain professions, like famous athletes and medical doctors.

(This means that scientifically speaking, it seems that somehow the placements of certain of the planets has a large statistically significant effect on at least career success in certain fields like professional athletics in this case; since Loss Leader has said this is too broad a sample, I have decided to try to statistically prove the significance of certain astrological positions at birth in the case of professional athletes, if not famous athletes, which term, "famous" Loss Leader also balks at saying that "fame" is too subjective to scientifically determine, although we could set criteria such as professional athletes who belong to professional athletics teams; there's no question there! See Loss Leader's comments in further posts.)

I will only use birth data, meaning, month, day, year, city, state, and country, and time of birth, e.g., 1 am, 3:15 pm, 12:23 pm, etc. as the case may be that is the most accurate in the field of astrology, namely Lois Rodden's AA, Accurate Accurate information, consisting of a Birth Certificate or Birth Record, see here:

http://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Help:RR

Lois Rodden's Astro-Databank is legendary in the field!

(Loss Leader also balks at this saying we cannot get enough accuracy in the birth data, although this is the most accurate there is anywhere and all we have to do, again, is define the terms of what we will accept as accurate in the protocol. I think what I'm saying is totally fair and feasible!)

Among many of my other accomplishments, I have been studying and using astrology as an autodidact for 45 years or since I was 12. I'm very familiar with the symbolism and can very easily inform any statistician on what to look for. There are thousands of cases worldwide for us to use.

Thank you for your continued interest. Any further questions, please let me know! !

Loss Leader's first set of comments and my rebuttal with further comments I will post in another post.

Um I just checked (having read this made me doubt) my calendar. Yep,its 2015 alright,not then the 14th century. What's next,blood letting,or how about a rain dance. I don't understand, really,I don't. I don't get it.
We know that astrology,including the "mars effect"is a product of wish full thinking,miss use of statistics,gullibility and out and out lies. Its absurd that anyone thinks there is any truth to it.

 

[carlitos]

Regarding athletic performance vs. birth date, this has been researched extensively and it has been shown that, on average, people born earlier in the year for that particular sport tend to perform better on average. There's no great mystery, throughout age group competition, the ones born earlier tend to perform better because they are older and hence tend to be bigger and stronger.

In the case of football it tends to be people born between August and December

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2011/jun/19/fa-plans-age-group-football

A similar effect is noted in academic acheivement.

In America, there are parents that hold back their kids a year before starting school, so that they will be a year older, bigger and stronger and more likely to succeed in school sports.

 

[Donn]

I'm not a famous athlete. Was I born?

 

[CynicalSkeptic]

What's famous and not famous? No judging or subjectivity to be disputed afterwards--this would need to be crystal clear and agreed ahead of time. For example, Olympic athletes. But one can't say that so-and-so qualified but had to drop out with a broken leg, so he should have counted, or so-and-so humiliated himself with a terrible Olympic performance so he shouldn't have counted. Whatever the criteria is, it needs to be agreed on without any subjectivity.

I would suggest using Olympic medalists. It will give you a wide variety of athletes from different countries, it's objectively well defined and impossible(?) to predict beforehand.

A simple claim would be something like "a statistically significant number of olympic medalists in the 2016 summer olympic games to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil will have been born at a time and place where Mars was visible above the horizon (or whatever the astrological description is)."

 

[CynicalSkeptic]

Um I just checked (having read this made me doubt) my calendar. Yep,its 2015 alright,not then the 14th century. What's next,blood letting,or how about a rain dance. I don't understand, really,I don't. I don't get it.
We know that astrology,including the "mars effect"is a product of wish full thinking,miss use of statistics,gullibility and out and out lies. Its absurd that anyone thinks there is any truth to it.

Couldn't the same be said about any "supernatural" claim made by MDC participants? That's kinda the point of the MDC.

 

[DuvalHMFIC]

If you were born January 12, there is a good chance you will be a famous radio announcer.

 

[Wudang]

Um I just checked (having read this made me doubt) my calendar. Yep,its 2015 alright,not then the 14th century. What's next,blood letting,or how about a rain dance. I don't understand, really,I don't. I don't get it.
We know that astrology,including the "mars effect"is a product of wish full thinking,miss use of statistics,gullibility and out and out lies. Its absurd that anyone thinks there is any truth to it.

That's rather harsh. People hang around other people and the psychological effects are well-documented. A chap on here known as Groundstrength was sure he could knock people out with light or no contact to the arm via "chi" effects. I've seen intelligent people get involved in groups like this and completely delude themselves. Look at some of the physicists who bought in parapsychology - sometimes more intelligent people are easier to fool as they think they are too smart to be fooled.


Avataress - the problem with defining a target by looking into the past can lead to the Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy^WP where you select your target based on where the bullets went. It's because of (often subconscious) bias like this that things like the "double blind" protocol was invented for medical trials. We can all fools ourselves, often non better.

 

[Pixel42]

The people who invented astrology believed that that earth was flat, the sun went round the earth, the stars were points of light on a crystal sphere and the planets were gods. They didn't believe these things because they were stupid - they weren't stupid, they were amongst the brightest minds of their generation - they believed them because they were ignorant. If all you know about the world is what you can learn from your own senses, this is the sort of guess you would come up with. They did the best they could with the minimal information they had.

But in the millenia since those inventors of astrology died, thanks first to the invention of writing and more recently to the invention of the scientific method, their descendants have amassed a veritable mountain of knowledge and understanding which is freely available to anyone alive today who can read and has access to a library or the internet. We know what the stars and the planets really are. We know that peoples' characters and personalities are actually determined by a combination of nature and nurture. We know about confirmation bias and the Forer Effect. We know about the dozens of scientific studies that tested the (easily testable) claims made by astrology, and showed that they don't stand up. We know that the perception that such claims are true is mistaken, an artifact of our brains' built in cognitive biases. We know that those cognitive biases evolved for good reason, but that we need to carefully and methodically eliminate their effect in order to reach reliable conclusions about the world around us.

The people who invented astrology may have had every excuse for believing it, but we don't. In order to believe in astrology today it is necessary to deliberately turn away from humanity's greatest achievement - its painstakingly accumulated store of knowledge and understanding - in order to wallow in ignorance and superstition.

If the people who invented astrology were alive today they would not believe in astrology. They would be thrilled by the information that is now available, and would not hesitate to take advantage of it to reach a much better understanding of the world than it was possible for them to achieve so long ago. And I think they would be disgusted by the spectacle of people wilfully ignoring all of it in order to cling to absurd and outdated beliefs.