Twins and astrology

[woodwater]

Hi
to give you an idea how difficult it is to test the accuracy of astrology with twins imagine this:
One twin wins millions in a lottery ticket. You would expect the other twin to also win millions,but thers only one ticket,so, only one can win

 

[Helianthus]

I am an identical twin and I can tell you that if one twin wins, they both do. Most twins have this weird feeling of being part of the other, half of a whole sort of thing going on. This intrinsic connection may not be true for all identical twins, but I would bet that it is for the vast majority. We're in our forties and it's as strong as ever. Just my thoughts, don't know what it means for astrological purposes, though.

More twins out there on JREF? Just wondering....

 

[Ladewig]

Hi
to give you an idea how difficult it is to test the accuracy of astrology with twins imagine this:
One twin wins millions in a lottery ticket. You would expect the other twin to also win millions,but thers only one ticket,so, only one can win

Are you suggesting that a good astrologer could predict that someone might win the lottery? If not, what exactly are you saying?

To give you an idea how easy it is to test the accuracy of astrology please consider that here in the 21st century we have very accurate birth data on tens of millions of people, we have computers that can store and organize hundreds of variables related to tens of thousands of people, we have computer programs that in a fraction of a second can test for correlation between birth dates and any of these variables.

Here's a good take on why astrology doesn't have the real stuff: http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/03/the_astrology_c.html

 

[Piggy]

to give you an idea how difficult it is to test the accuracy of astrology with twins imagine this:
One twin wins millions in a lottery ticket. You would expect the other twin to also win millions,but thers only one ticket,so, only one can win

I can't tell what your point is.

Are you saying that this thought experiment proves that astrology must be bunk?

Or are you saying that single-winner lotteries somehow demonstrate that astrology can be correct even if testing shows it to be bogus?

 

[Ladewig]

Hi
to give you an idea how difficult it is to test the accuracy of astrology with twins imagine this:
One twin wins millions in a lottery ticket. You would expect the other twin to also win millions,but there's only one ticket,so, only one can win

Except that all U.S. single-state lotteries and all U.S. multi-state lotteries allow more than one player to choose the same set of numbers so it is common to have more than one winning ticket. Wow, astrology just got much easier to test.

 

[Admiral]

Well, I'm an identical twin, and we both just got into the same college (Harvard). Could that be evidence of astrology's power?

Well, the trouble is that you can't run an experiment using this because of all the other factors that are similar between twins. For example, my brother and I are very similar students and some pairs of twins might both use the same lottery numbers.

In general, running this sort of thought experiment is a silly idea. To be honest, I'm not sure what your point is, woodwater... If you're saying that you want to test whether astrology works by seeing if two twins have similar things happen to each other, then I'd be happy to test that. I could type up a few questions about the differences between us, or whatever your suggested protocol is. Or, we could flip coins and see if the flips come up the same way more than would be predicted by chance.

There is one issue that might complicate things, however- our birthday is February 19th, which is often stated as the cutoff point between Aquarius and Pisces. Although our birth certificates suggest that our times of birth are only one minute apart, astrologers could offer the post hoc hypothesis that one of us is Aquarius and one Pisces, or our segmented-house trigonometry is double bisected at the point where Saturn's orbit intersects the elliptic plane or whatever.

 

[Helianthus]

Hey, we're on the cusp of Cancer and Leo, July 23rd...and just for the heck of it, what about the twins with different birth dates, i.e. one born before midnight and one after? The similarities of twins stick out, but I can't help thinking of all the disagreements I've had with my sis.

My take is that you are right, using twins is not the best way to test astrology.