cbostrum@watdaisy.UUCP (Calvin Bruce Ostrum) (07/21/83)
Yes, there have been a number of attempts to test astrology's claims
in a scientific manner. Yes, the skeptical inquirer has covered many of these
and even sponsered one of them. It has been a while since I read their
coverage, however.
The crackpot (ahem, controversial) psychologist Hans Eysenck was drawn
into it for a while. He specialises in finding really wierd explanations
for correlations; for example, he used to claim that rather than smoking
causing cancer, there was one geneotype that disposed individuals to both
otherwise unconnected phenotypes of becoming a smoker and developing
cancer. He has since withdrawn this claim, as well as his astrology claim,
the latter when he discovered that the subjects knowledge of astrology was
sufficient to explain the correlation (these subjects judged themselves as
to which horoscope they fit. When he took people who professed no knowedge
of typical astrological relationships, the correlations vanished).
The major investigators are the French couple Gaugelin. From the reports
in the SI, I think it is clear that their study is very suspect. But SI
itself has to be taken very carefully since it has a venomous hatred
of the paranormal (I suspect at least in the case of Gardner and Randi this
is due to their "traditional" religious beliefs that do not jibe
with astrology, does anyone know anything about this possibility?).
The Gaugelin test used something called the rising sign, which varies very
quickly and therefore is not subject to the criticism that Tim Maroney gave.
(By the way, his suggestion for a study has very clear flaws in it: a skilled
"astrologer" could quite easily lead the conversation to his advantage. Better
to let friends of the people involved attempt to match up the horoscopes).
The Gaugelins took a number of champion athletes and found a statistically
signifigant deviation from the chance distributions in comfirmation of the
predictions of astrology.
Admidst the paranoid and venomous attacks of SI it is possible to discern
problems with the result. The central one is a variation on the following
theme: when the results are not signifigant, the G's maintain that the
athletes included are not good enough, and that the thing only works for
true champions. Thus, the lessor champions have to be dropped. It is not
at all clear how they do this, and it is clear that there is no principled
dividing line between the true champions and the lessor champions. This
insistence of the G's gives them a much better chance (certain?) of finding
their correlations. On one occasion they actually went so far as to exclude
all basketball players (who didnt show the "effect")!
If we imagine that the correlation is random, using a random walk principle
or something similar I imagine (I dont know this type of math myself, maybe
someone can enlighten us) that with some simple idealisation one could prove
that it is always possible to find a "statistically signifigant" correlation
by continuously tightening the definition of the independent variable until
it was found, and stopping just at that point. It seems that this is what the
G's have done.
There was a bit of a scandal in SI about intestine strife between members
of the SI team investgating this. One of them claims to have been kicked
out of CSICOP (the org pusblishing SI) when he criticised the investigation
of SI as being shoddy statistics arguing from a foregone conclusion point
of view.
From the contentious info I have, I side with him at this point. I do
not like the attitude of Randi for one, altho he does provide a useful
service.
Calvin Bruce Ostrum, Computer Science, University of Waterloo
...{decvax,allegra,utzoo}!watmath!watdaisy!cbostrum