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>"astrology is a starting point with zero correlation with who you are" I would really doubt that it is zero, the relative position of the celestial bodies cor

by nonbel 10y ago

>"astrology is a starting point with zero correlation with who you are" I would really doubt that it is zero, the relative position of the celestial bodies correlates with season. All sorts of human activities follow a yearly cycle, including birth rates and mortality rates. I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality. I would take it further and say a good principle is that "everything is correlated with everything else", it is just a matter of the strength of the relationship. I will probably get downmodded for that, because it is in direct conflict the "null hypothesis" testing paradigm that has dominated data analysis for the last half century or so.

gnaritas 10y ago
> I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality. There's no evidence of this, so you should have doubts.
- nonbel 10y ago
  Sure there is, I found thousands of papers on it with one simple search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=season+of+birth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=season+of+birth EG: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0034866 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151 I don't know much about astrology, but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? From my understanding, it is basically a way of binning together sets of birthdays. There will probably be various artifacts and noise introduced by the binning process, but I am sure with large enough sample size you will see the correlation.
  - amelius 10y ago
    http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-birth-month-influences-personality-traits-ironic-science-astrological-signs-333274 http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-birth-month-influences-perso...
  - Mz 10y ago
    I don't know much about astrology, Then please kindly don't defend it. but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? I have actually studied astrology. Serious astrologers loathe sun sign astrology.
    - nonbel 10y ago
      I wasn't defending astrology, I was attacking the pseudoscientific thought process being used to attack astrology.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - gnaritas 10y ago
    No, you didn't anything relevant there about personality types; personality disorders are a vastly different subject. > I don't know much about astrology, Now we agree.
    - nonbel 10y ago
      Well, I tried searching "Myers Briggs season", etc. I didn't find any data on it all. It is one of those topics... too many low quality (unscholarly: not citing references , etc) sources popped up so I won't waste any further time on it. I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though.
      - gnaritas 10y ago
        > I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though. I can correlations the drop in pirates with a rise in global temperature, so what... correlations don't mean a damn thing by themselves, that's just data-mining bias.
        nonbel 10y ago
        No, it is not data-mining bias. There really is a correlation. It is real, but realizing that has no usefulness at all.
        gnaritas 10y ago
        The correlation with pirates is real too, that's my point, correlations don't mean anything. Only causation is meaningful. The only use of a correlation is as a starting point for finding causation.
        nonbel 10y ago
        Actually... I think causation may largely be a red herring as well. Our most successful models really do not incorporate it at all. They are in the form of F=ma or PV=nRT. There is no causality there.
btilly 10y ago
There are indeed measured weak correlations between seasons and personality. Things like your odds of being bipolar are higher if you were born in late winter, and lower for summer/early fall. (The same correlations exist in the Southern hemisphere, but with the obvious 6 month shift.) However there aren't correlations between those known correlations and the traits that astrology says that you should have. Therefore there is no known correlation between your astrological description and your personality. And yes, people have attempted to measure this.
- nonbel 10y ago
  It all depends on the sample size. If sufficient money is put towards it you will find the correlation. People have also done studies on this for around 50 years, everything is correlated with everything else: 'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.' https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf "One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square" http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY3801H/readings/Readings%20-%2003Bakan%201966.pdf http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38... "...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p < 10–6)." http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/meehl1967.pdf http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...

by nonbel 10y ago

gnaritas 10y ago

> I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality. There's no evidence of this, so you should have doubts.

nonbel 10y ago
Sure there is, I found thousands of papers on it with one simple search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=season+of+birth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=season+of+birth EG: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0034866 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151 I don't know much about astrology, but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? From my understanding, it is basically a way of binning together sets of birthdays. There will probably be various artifacts and noise introduced by the binning process, but I am sure with large enough sample size you will see the correlation.
- amelius 10y ago
  http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-birth-month-influences-personality-traits-ironic-science-astrological-signs-333274 http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-birth-month-influences-perso...
- Mz 10y ago
  I don't know much about astrology, Then please kindly don't defend it. but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? I have actually studied astrology. Serious astrologers loathe sun sign astrology.
  - nonbel 10y ago
    I wasn't defending astrology, I was attacking the pseudoscientific thought process being used to attack astrology.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- gnaritas 10y ago
  No, you didn't anything relevant there about personality types; personality disorders are a vastly different subject. > I don't know much about astrology, Now we agree.
  - nonbel 10y ago
    Well, I tried searching "Myers Briggs season", etc. I didn't find any data on it all. It is one of those topics... too many low quality (unscholarly: not citing references , etc) sources popped up so I won't waste any further time on it. I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though.
    - gnaritas 10y ago
      > I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though. I can correlations the drop in pirates with a rise in global temperature, so what... correlations don't mean a damn thing by themselves, that's just data-mining bias.
      - nonbel 10y ago
        No, it is not data-mining bias. There really is a correlation. It is real, but realizing that has no usefulness at all.
        gnaritas 10y ago
        The correlation with pirates is real too, that's my point, correlations don't mean anything. Only causation is meaningful. The only use of a correlation is as a starting point for finding causation.
        nonbel 10y ago
        Actually... I think causation may largely be a red herring as well. Our most successful models really do not incorporate it at all. They are in the form of F=ma or PV=nRT. There is no causality there.

btilly 10y ago

There are indeed measured weak correlations between seasons and personality. Things like your odds of being bipolar are higher if you were born in late winter, and lower for summer/early fall. (The same correlations exist in the Southern hemisphere, but with the obvious 6 month shift.) However there aren't correlations between those known correlations and the traits that astrology says that you should have. Therefore there is no known correlation between your astrological description and your personality. And yes, people have attempted to measure this.

nonbel 10y ago
It all depends on the sample size. If sufficient money is put towards it you will find the correlation. People have also done studies on this for around 50 years, everything is correlated with everything else: 'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.' https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf "One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square" http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY3801H/readings/Readings%20-%2003Bakan%201966.pdf http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38... "...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p < 10–6)." http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/meehl1967.pdf http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...