Skyscript Astrology Forum

Hi Atlantean
I understand your maths and how finding consecutive ''right minutes'' becomes increasingly statistically remarkable. However in the harsh world of science were you to be given 5 days and asked to find the exact minute and succeed the scientist would be amazed, as would many astrologers, but they would need continuous demonstrations of the ability of POLARIS.

I am just speculating here but were you to get to 20 exact minutes from 20 subjects they may decide to stop the experiment. However there is no doubt that to demonstrate its unequivocal abilities POLARIS would need to be tested again and again.

In case I am not being clear I will provide an analogy. I toss a coin a 100 times a day for 50 years. On each day the result is between 25-75 for Tails and 25-75 for Heads. But over one particular 7 day period it was between 90-95 for Heads. If I went to the scientist at the end of this week and informed him of my ability to toss a coin and produce this result he would be unimpressed because he knows this is a chance result. This is why 500 as an initial sample size would be an absolute minimum in my opinion.

Astrology is seen as absurd therefore any result which suggests it isn't will require very rigorous testing, as if it were proved not to be we would be faced with a quite extraordinary paradigm shift. 5 direct consecutive hits would raise eyebrows but little else. As far as I am aware we are not at the stage where we have had 1 hit out of 1, under controlled conditions.

Well our school maths curriculum did not extend to calculation of odds or chance but I do know that bookies will only take a bet if the odds are in their favour from the start.

Again, in the world of gambling, they are fond of saying "either put up or shut up"

Pax Fratres

Matt

Hello Mike N

Yes, I understand your coin-tossing analogy and it is a good one, but I don't think that it applies here...

In the coin-toss, there is a possible variance THROUGH TIME. The coins that you flipped today that came up all heads, might tomorrow come up all tails.

Polaris is software...if I enter your events today...and do so again every day for a thousand years, Polaris will always, ALWAYS give the same output.

You are correct, I feel, that scientific types might still not have a clue of the significance, but that doesn't devalue the significance, it devalues those placing the significance.

A 1 in 1440 chance that is defeated is quite some accomplishment (ie. on a different "order" than flipping coins). Were Polaris to replicate this numerous times, it would be impossible to (rightly) deny the significance.

Again, think of it with a real world analogy. You and 4 friends are standing around and someone comes up and says that he can tell ALL OF YOU your birth minute...

The first time, someone might yell "fluke." Maybe even the second time... by the fifth time (with a correct answer), the deductive reasoning is that either there was some cheating going on, OR this person has quite some ability/talent.

When you mention 500 cases as a minimum, it sounds more like something a skeptic would say AFTER Polaris already nailed it 5 times. (ie. oops, we better discount this test somehow, or we are going to have to do a lot of back-pedaling) This 500 number seems realistic in systems where there is variance... Polaris is a computer program... it is NOT user-influenceable. If I enter your events and 3 other Polaris owners do so, as long as we put the events in their proper categories, we will all get the same output from Polaris. Instead of thinking of Polaris finding some minute during the day, think of someone having a bag full of 1439 black marbles and 1 white one. If you open the bag and say, pull me out a white one, and the person does so, it is a wow moment. It's not the first step of 500 necessary repetitions in order to be "amazed".

Additionally, the mass quantity of tests that you mention work and make sense when we are analyzing something where the odds aren't mathematically obvious or able to be immediately calculated. When the odds ARE directly "measurable", then the defeating of those odds already expresses its "specialness". The problem is, you will find people who won't appreciate the significance...but that is THEIR problem. The odds ARE the odds.

Peace

Hi Atlantean

If you walked into a Psychology Department, pulled out your laptop and asked the first 5 Psychologists you encountered there to give you their date / place of birth and 20 events in their lives, and you then proceeded to tell them within 5 minutes their Birth Times they would doubtless be amazed, incredulous, disbelieving, fascinated and so forth.

If you then asked them if they were convinced by POLARIS being able to do this for either everyone or most people they would probably laugh. This is Science. If you then asked them what they would consider to be a fair, to both sides, assessment then I am reasonably confident this figure of 500 samples would be near enough the one they would propose.

So pulling 5 white marbles out, guessing 5 correct times, etc. would amount to very little. I am not sure to what extent the way research like this is usually conducted is clear to you. Beating remarkable odds with a small sample will merely generate an interest which as its astrology would be quite an achievement.

You really would have to run an analysis of variance for the results based on sample size and so on. With statistics, it's not a matter of what is intuitively amazing or even of odds. Its the results taken in a context that analyzes the probability of the result being significant. And the experimental design has to make sense as well.

- Ed

Hello Ed

I looked up Analysis of Variance and saw T TEST which sent shivers down my spine recalling those confusing undergraduate days.

But seriously. I am sure statistics will reveal something here, but in my experience most of the time a quick look at the data tells you if the hypothesis is being supported.

Do you think 500 is a good starting point?

I didn?t want this study to go unacknowledged from the discussion here.
http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/Dean.pdf[/quote]
(Scroll down for Time Twins).

As it reinforces my earlier view about the poverty of most experiments into astrology that I have seen:

''Measurements at ages 11, 16 and 23 had provided for each person 110 relevant variables including test scores for IQ, reading and arithmetic; teacher and parent ratings of behaviour such as anxiety, aggressiveness and sociability; physical data such as height, weight, vision and hearing; Self-ratings of ability such as art, music and sports; and various others such as occupation, accident proneness and marital status; all of which are supposed to be shown in the birth chart''.

Just picking out at a few of these, are there any intelligent astrologer's in 2010 who think height, weight, IQ, reading, marital status,..........can be seen clearly or even at all in a horoscope. I don't believe there are, so on what basis is Dean thinking this is what they in fact do believe?

There is little information as to how these variables are measured. Height, for example, is relatively straightforward, but Art. Would a subject have to draw something or write an essay about a Picasso? Or music, some competent musicians have little interest in or appreciation of it and some non-musicians who have been unable to learn how to play an instrument yet have a profound knowledge and appreciation of it. Much of this is self-rated, the mind boggles.

Overall ,based on this brief amount of information, it does not strike me as becoming, if in fact it is a work in progress, a serious attempt to see if Time Twins have any Psychic or Dispositional similarities.

The Roberts/Greengrass 1994 study into Time Twins found ?
??there were no clear similarities in appearance, handwriting, names or life events??.

Again isn?t this what most astrologers today would expect?

I agree Mkie I find the research a bit lacking

Mike

Two people born on the same day, the same place, exactly the same time.
How would you deal with that, when asked to do a blind reading? Would one not have to arrive at the same characteristics?
this is what astrologers have been saying all along: "give me a chart and I can explain its charactericts:
character and lot."

Mike N wrote:Hello Ed

I looked up Analysis of Variance and saw T TEST which sent shivers down my spine recalling those confusing undergraduate days.

But seriously. I am sure statistics will reveal something here, but in my experience most of the time a quick look at the data tells you if the hypothesis is being supported.

Do you think 500 is a good starting point?

How large the sample needs to be can only be determined in the context of the variables and effects and the statistical tests being used. That said, it's been 35 years since I took my statistics courses, and I'm out of my element.

- Ed

Thank you Ed for your ideas on the Statistics. The Experimental Design for POLARIS would need to be undertaken in conjunction with someone with a more advanced understanding in this area than I at least have.

Hello again dmause

I wouldn?t talk to someone about their chart without being engaged in a direct conversation. The kind of astrology which interests me goes from the person to the chart.

The spectrum of opinion as to what a horoscope can tell you about one?s character and/or lot in life appears to range from almost everything to almost nothing.

What these Time Twin studies, however superficial, suggest to me is that it is not possible to look at a chart and say something is likely to happen to someone on, or in, a particular Day,Month, Year. I think this is an important finding as even today there are astrologers who attempt to predict the future in quite concrete terms. This mind-set would appear to be futile and idiotic.

My view on time twins is there should be underlying similarities of dispositions, but little else. This is due to the enormous impact of one?s environment and in this I include very much the family, or lack of, you are born into.

I?m hopefully not down playing, or seeking to run away from, foundational premises of astrology. I recall in my early teens my 2 best friends having birthdays either side of my own. At the time I knew nothing of astrology. Looking back it struck me that there was a noticeable empathy between us. It is these kinds of happenings which generated my subsequent interest.

[quote="Atlantean"]Hello,

Hi Atlantean

I noticed in Ray Murphy`s forum that you moved from the USA to Germany.
How did Astrocartography affected you if at all?

Thanks