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On average literacy as to what astrology is in fact growing not shrinking. This is in particular due to social media and YouTubers who get into the nitty gritty

On average literacy as to what astrology is in fact growing not shrinking. This is in particular due to social media and YouTubers who get into the nitty gritty details of birth time based astrology. You don’t need to prove the causative relationship in many cases. Look at modern ML where “why does this model predict the outcome so well” is generally an open research question.

brokencode 5y ago
Astrology proponents on social media and YouTube are also taking advantage of people who don’t know better. You are not going to learn that astrology is baseless from its proponents, especially not from proponents who make money off of astrology content. Even if we don’t know exactly why an ML model works well for a specific problem, we at least can verify that it does in fact work. And we do at least understand the mathematical principles behind the model. But we have no credible evidence for astrology, even after thousands of years of claims and predictions. And there is no theory for how it could work other than basically magic. Again, it would be incredible to find such evidence, but I don’t think that will ever happen.
wespiser_2018 5y ago
You don't need to prove statistical properties in deep learning models, but if that was something important, that's something you'd be able to do for any classifier that has positive predictive ability. If a classifier is good, then there is an underlying association in the data. With astrology, there's no association in the data, unless you do something weird like constrain the size of your sample, systematically exclude people, or are measuring a different effect. It's really totally absurd to use the methods of science on astrology. Just think about it, you have some data, and there's an effect you'd like to figure out. For whatever is going on in your sample, your explanation is "because the position of X on the day you were born?". It's a huge violation of occam's razor, and skips every plausible explanation for the most impossible. No one that seriously does "data science" could approach a question, and come up with astrological answers, unless it was purely an exercise in B.S., with the express goal of creating content for people interested in astrology to consume. "Data scientists" spend years honing and refining their skills asking and answering questions, it's just incongruent with that set of skills and methodology.

brokencode 5y ago

Astrology proponents on social media and YouTube are also taking advantage of people who don’t know better. You are not going to learn that astrology is baseless from its proponents, especially not from proponents who make money off of astrology content. Even if we don’t know exactly why an ML model works well for a specific problem, we at least can verify that it does in fact work. And we do at least understand the mathematical principles behind the model. But we have no credible evidence for astrology, even after thousands of years of claims and predictions. And there is no theory for how it could work other than basically magic. Again, it would be incredible to find such evidence, but I don’t think that will ever happen.

wespiser_2018 5y ago

You don't need to prove statistical properties in deep learning models, but if that was something important, that's something you'd be able to do for any classifier that has positive predictive ability. If a classifier is good, then there is an underlying association in the data. With astrology, there's no association in the data, unless you do something weird like constrain the size of your sample, systematically exclude people, or are measuring a different effect. It's really totally absurd to use the methods of science on astrology. Just think about it, you have some data, and there's an effect you'd like to figure out. For whatever is going on in your sample, your explanation is "because the position of X on the day you were born?". It's a huge violation of occam's razor, and skips every plausible explanation for the most impossible. No one that seriously does "data science" could approach a question, and come up with astrological answers, unless it was purely an exercise in B.S., with the express goal of creating content for people interested in astrology to consume. "Data scientists" spend years honing and refining their skills asking and answering questions, it's just incongruent with that set of skills and methodology.