arundelo comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

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

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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: 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%.