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While on the topic of astrology, people might find it interesting to read about IMO the definitive study that shows it's bunk [1]. In it you can see that they t
by vlasev 11y ago
While on the topic of astrology, people might find it interesting to read about IMO the definitive study that shows it's bunk [1]. In it you can see that they took a lot of "time twins" (people born within a small time window on the order of hours or minutes) and measure if astrology had any predictive power over their lives. Spoiler: no, not really. Just a couple of quotes:
"The spacing of human births in a large population is described by a Poisson distribution, which shows that every year in a city of one million people about 4,000 pairs of time twins are born 5 minutes apart or less."
"Unlike the Roberts and Greengrass approach (count each time twin against every other time twin within one day, which would have produced nearly 600,000 pairs), serial correlation counts each time twin once only, thus minimizing the risk of artifacts. So the test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success. But the results are uniformly negative, see Table 2. The effect size due to astrology is 0.00 ± 0.03."
[1] http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/Dean.pdf http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/Dean.pdf