gsmith@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Gene Ward Smith) (04/17/86)
In article <7207@tekecs.UUCP> keithr@tekecs.UUCP (Keith Rowell) writes: >I came across an article in Fate magazine the other day that >purported to be a debunking of a CSICOP effort to debunk French >astrologer Michel Gauquelin's statistical study of birth date >and occupation. (Fate is a small pulp magazine that specializes >The article by Dennis Rawlins in the October 1981 issue of Fate >is called sTARBABY. Rawlins is "cofounder of [CSICOP] and >served on CSICOP's Executive Council from 1976 to 1979. Until >1980 he was an Associate Editor of Skeptical Enquirer. >"The bottom line is: >"Every one of the Councilors [participating in the Gauquelin >investigation] who say they know something about the sTARBABY >[Gauquelin investigation] knows that it was a disaster. Yet >Skeptical Inquirer readers are given to believe nothing went >wrong." Many of you may have heard about a recent research project conducted here at Berkeley and published, I believe, in the December issue of Nature. This tested whether astrologers could accurately determine the psychology of individuals from birth information, and came up with a negative result. I went to a lecture by the fellow who did this research, and he *totally trashed* the CSICOP investigation in *very strong* terms. So more than one presumably informed opinion agrees that this particular investigation was useless ("disaster" "disgrace" and "coverup" were words I recall this guy using). >Probably, Dennis Rawlins is just a disgruntled former CSICOPer >and his reasons for writing the article are not at all what they >seem to be, right? Well, I'm not so sure about that... Having heard this lecture, neither am I. ucbvax!brahms!gsmith Gene Ward Smith/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720 ucbvax!weyl!gsmith "When Ubizmo talks, people listen."