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army1987 comments on The uniquely awful example of theism - Less Wrong
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How about astrology? I had a physics teacher in high school who believed in horoscopes!
So did Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo.
And it's actually sort of difficult to show that the Mars effect isn't anything spooky. [ETA: "spooky" was poor word choice, I just mean "not a statistical artifact", not necessarily anything "supernatural".] That said, I have little idea to what extent modern astrology is descended from legitimate traditions.
I don't see anything particularly spooky... there's a zillion of things to correlate Mars with, and consequently, assuming null hypothesis there will be things correlated with Mars with supposedly high confidence. After you wait and re-test with new data, you reduce number of those things but the few that remain, you are even more confident in.
Also, one mars year is approximately 2 earth years, and the Mars is in approximately same position relative to Earth (and relative to sun in the sky, i.e. the height for the people born at whenever most people are born) on every second year. The Olympic games are every 4 years. So short term it is even plausible that there might be some actual weak correlation very indirectly caused by this.
And today, an Italian TV news programme stated, with a straight face, that people with water or fire astrological signs are more likely to be obese than people with earth or air signs (or vice versa, or something like that).
(That wouldn't be completely a-priori-absurd if it was a division of the year in two consecutive six-month periods, as I could buy some kind of story on why (say) people who spent the first few months of extra-uterine life in winter are more likely to be obese, if there were some kind of evidence for it; but Wikipedia tells me that the elements of signs are interleaved around the year, so I can't imagine any explanation whatsoever on how such an effect could be possible.)