thomblake comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: TheatreAddict 22 January 2012 04:43:53AM 1 point [-]

Okay, so astrology to me sounds extremely unscientific. But I haven't read anything on the subject, and other than knowing that it's something a lot of scientists thing is.. unscientific. To be perfectly fair, I can't just dismiss it because other people dismiss it.

I'd like to be able to dismiss it for scientific reasons. Because I was reading my horoscope, and I was like, "Hmm, well these are extremely vague statements that could apply to anyone and I don't particularly identify with." But then I was reading a friends, and I majorly freaked out because of how accurate it was.

So because of that, I now want to know the truth. Either astrology works or it doesn't. Does anyone know how I could go about determining this? I mean, does anyone have any books or online articles that they would recommend? I'd really appreciate it. I just want to understand.

Comment author: DSimon 22 January 2012 07:31:51AM *  5 points [-]

Here's a really neat chart from OkTrends (a blog discussing data from the dating website OkCupid) showing match percentages between people of various astrological signs, based on similarity between the users' answers to a wide range of questions:

http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/races_and_religions/Match-By-Zodiac-Title.png

The data there implies pretty strongly that astrological sign has no predictive ability when it comes to a person's self-description.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 January 2012 03:48:14PM *  2 points [-]

Unless they had several thousand couples for each one of the 144 cells, I'm very surprised there weren't bigger fluctuations due to chance alone. (And that single “59” shows that they didn't round all numbers to the nearest ten.)

Comment author: DSimon 22 January 2012 05:10:32PM *  6 points [-]

Sorry, I should have linked the article earlier instead of just the chart.

On sample size: Keep in mind that it isn't couples that are being looked at here, just comparisons between users' self-reports. Specifically, each question has two answers: The user's self-report, and what they would want a potential date to answer. The compatibility percentage is based on matching from A's wants to B's reports and vice-versa.

For the article, data was collected from a randomly selected pool of 500,000 straight users. The gender balance among straight users is about 60% men, 40% women, so that's about 25,000 men in each row and 17,000 women in each column. So each cell has about 400 million comparisons.

Comment author: arundelo 22 January 2012 05:27:52PM *  4 points [-]

Indeed they did -- about 868 million couples per cell by my reckoning, or about half that if they're only pairing based on preferred gender:

Here are the grouped match percentages for a random pool of 500,000 users. Astrological sign has no effect whatsoever on how compatible two people are.

[...]

We're showing you this table, as dull as it is, because the uniformity neatly illustrates how beefy our data set is. There are 144 pools considered above, and they all match the mean plus or minus 0.5%.

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