Jesse

Volker.Doormann:
Sure, that there must be a causality, but it is not a must, that for this causality must exist an explanation. There are many things in the world, which are used, and there is no explanation. You use for example logic. But you cannot give an explanation, how logic works. Yes or yes? (Maybe some of your four forces are involved in the working of logic?).

Complete non sequitur. Logic is just a part of math, it's not a theory postulating that one physical object in the universe is having a causal influence on another object in the universe. Astrology is. Can you think of any theories of causal influences between objects where scientists would not care if there is no known mechanism to transmit that influence, and where in fact it seems we can rule out all known physical mechanisms?

Volker.Doormann:
As Kepler has shown, the gravity or mass of a planet in (nearly) irrrlevant to the cycles of time oscillating with the sun

Jesse:
Nearly irrelevant? I have no idea what you mean here..

Volker.Doormann:
The force of gravitation includes the mass of the sun, as well as the mass of the specific planet. But because the mass of a planet is several orders minor to the mass of the sun, I have said ‘nearly’.

Sure, this is similar to how objects which are small compared to the earth fall at the same rate (if air resistance is ignored) in the earth's gravity, even if their own masses are quite different. But this sounds like another non sequitur--what does this have to do with the fact that the gravitational influence of a planet on a baby's brain is miniscule compared to the gravitational influence of the earth, and similar to that of cars, nearby buildings, etc.?

Volker.Doormann:
If you speculate on a working mechanism regarding the physics of astrology, it is your freedom.

I have replied to the Randi’s disproving astrology claims, which was shown to be irrelevant to the science of astrology.

Showing that no force known to science could be the mechanism by which astrological influences are transmitted is certainly not irrelevant--it makes astrology inherently less plausible as a scientific hypothesis. This is similar to how, for example, the lack of a plausible mechanism for translating changes in an animal's body into changed gene sequences makes Lamarckism inherently less plausible as a theory, and is one of the main reasons scientists reject it. Randi is just subjecting astrology to the same standards as any scientific theory.

Jesse

First of all, most of those statements would probably be counted as "hits" by more than 5% of the population. Second, you cannot look just at the hits on a list of hits and misses and calculate the "significance value" from the hits alone--this would be like if I claimed to be able to influence the outcome of a coinflip, then flipped a coin twenty times, and said "well, I was trying to make the coin come up heads, and flips #3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, and 20 all did come up heads--the chance that all those flips would all come up heads is only 1 in 2^10, or 1 in 1024!" You must include both hits and misses in your significance level, otherwise you're just cherrypicking the data. This is elementary statistics.

Volker.Doormann

The one who is postulating [xyz] is you. The question is, whether one can make use of something, which is not explained or one can not make use of it. And to this question your imaginations are irrelevant.No one has stated that. Randi has dealt with gravity potential only. But gravitational effects are not limited to this. A gravitational energy also can transmitted for example (!) by gravitational waves and in addition to this amplified, by planetary mass ('lens') and geometrical effects of interfering gravitational waves. This shows, that beyond the imaginations of Randi, there are well known forces to science exist, which have not taken into account regarding the building of brain structures in a baby. This does not mean, that this must be the case, but it is wrong to claim, that there are no known effects in science next to gravity potential.

Volker.Doormann

This is an opinion without any scientific prove. I can, and I do. I have said, that significance cannot made untrue by fails. It is simple boolean logic. If you not agree, we can close.

Jesse

Volker.Doormann:
The one who is postulating [xyz] is you.

What does "xyz" stand for? All I'm postulating is that there must be a causal influence between a baby's brain and a planet for astrology to work. Do you disagree with this?

Volker.Doormann:
The question is, whether one can make use of something, which is not explained or one can not make use of it.

What do you mean, "the" question? I hope you'd agree that that's not the only question scientists look at when evaluating a theory--if there is no plausible mechanism for a purported influence of one thing on another, that's a strike against the theory from a scientific point of view.

Maybe astrologers don't feel the same way, but Randi was evaluating astrology's status as a scientific theory, so his criticism is completely valid.

Volker.Doormann:
Randi has dealt with gravity potential only. But gravitational effects are not limited to this. A gravitational energy also can transmitted for example (!) by gravitational waves and in addition to this amplified, by planetary mass ('lens') and geometrical effects of interfering gravitational waves.

You're grasping at straws here. If the gravitational force from a planet is miniscule, the effects of gravitational waves from that planet will be miniscule as well, since these waves should diminish as a function of the square of the distance just like the ordinary gravitational force. To speculate that "interference" or "lensing" (from what? The gravitational lensing from another planet will be tiny, and there are no black holes floating around in the solar system) could somehow radically amplify the gravitational force from another planet is exactly like suggesting that the light (electromagnetic waves) from the planets could temporarily create a light in the sky as bright as the sun due to interference/lensing. It just doesn't work that way, as I'm sure any quantitative analysis of the effects of lensing/interference on gravitational waves from the planets would show.

Volker.Doormann:
This shows, that beyond the imaginations of Randi, there are well known forces to science exist, which have not taken into account regarding the building of brain structures in a baby. This does not mean, that this must be the case, but it is wrong to claim, that there are no known effects in science next to gravity potential.

I didn't say anything about "gravity potential", I said "the force of gravitation". Gravitational waves are included as part of the modern theory of the gravitational force, and as I said, these waves obey an inverse-square law of diminishing strength with increasing distance just like the Newtonian gravitational force (and I'm not sure if planets travelling in elliptical orbits emit gravitational waves at all--I seem to recall that general relativity says objects moving in uniform circular orbits don't emit gravitational waves, so the same might be true of elliptical orbits). There's just no way that effects like lensing would alter the basic conclusion that the gravitational effects from the earth and earthbound objects swamp the gravitational effects from the planets. Same with the force of electromagnetism, whether you're talking about electromagnetic waves or just the ordinary coulomb force. Like I said, imagining that gravitational waves from planets can occasionally radically increase in strength due to interference/lensing is exactly analogous to imagining that the light from planets can occasionally outshine the sun due to interference/lensing. Any actual calculation, as opposed to just vague handwaving, will show this is not plausible.

Jesse

Jesse :
... most of those statements would probably be counted as "hits" by more than 5% of the population.

Volker.Doormann:
This is an opinion without any scientific prove.

As was your statement that they would not be counted as "hits" by more than 5% of the population. Do you honestly believe that no more than 5% of the population would count "your feelings are vulnerable" as a hit?

Jesse:
.. you cannot look just at the hits on a list

Volker.Doormann:
I can, and I do. I have said, that significance cannot made untrue by fails. It is simple boolean logic.

No Volker, you flunk basic statistics here--if you cherrypick the data in retrospect, throwing out "misses" and counting "hits", you can get an arbitrarily high significance level for any conclusion you like. What you are doing is exactly analogous to my coinflip example--do you think, in that case, that because the coin came up heads on flips #3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, and 20, I am free to ignore the fact that it came up tails on the other ten flips and say that the conclusion "I have the psychic power to make the coin come up heads" is supported with a significance level of 1 in 1024? If not, please explain why you think the coinflip example is different from what you have done.

Here's another example. Let's say I live in a country where the following statements each apply to exactly half the population:

1. You have brown eyes
2. You have dark hair
3. You are a male
4. You own a car
5. You are an extrovert
6. You are overweight
7. You are over five feet nine inches tall
8. You prefer chocolate to vanilla
9. You prefer rap to rock 'n' roll
10. You eat out at least once a week

Now, knowing that each statement applies to half the population, you would expect that if you give this profile to a random person in this country, about half the statements will apply to them, correct? So let's say I give the profile to Bob, and he finds the following "hits":

2. You have dark hair
3. You are a male
4. You own a car
6. You are overweight
8. You prefer chocolate to vanilla

By your "simple boolean logic", it would be valid to say that the significance level here is 1 in 2^5, or 1 in 32. And yet, as I said, it seems obvious that about one half of all people will have five or more statements apply to them, even if they're not the same five statements that applied to Bob. Would you give every single such case a significance level of 1 in 32 (or higher)? This would make nonsense of the whole notion of "significance level", since the point of a significance level of 1 in 32 is that you should only obtain such a level of success 1 in 32 times by random chance. This is exactly like what you're doing when you only count the hits in the "significance level" of an astrological profile.

Volker.Doormann

You have read, what I have written to causalitiy. And you have read, what I have written to the 'many things in the world, which are used, and there is no explanation'.? I do make use of logic (some times). I think no one can explain logic by natural science, its nature and cause.

From this (!) I think one can make use of astrology, also if there is no explanation available (yet).

But - Mr. Randi has claimed, that there is no explanation to astrology, and this shold prove, that astrology should not be a valid system.

If this would have a meaning, than logic would also not be a valid system, because no one can explain the nature of logic.

It is not my intention to discuss here the possible physical mechanism of astrology. It was my intention only to reply on Randis fantasy claims.

Volker.Doormann

I do not agree with you. I close.

Lobstrosity

By the way, those were two very good examples, Jesse. Maybe I should make a poll to see what percentage of the people here would have regarded my hits as hits for themselves.

Also, Volker, it should be obvious that you can't just count the "hits" when doing statistics. If you could, then an astrological profile that essentially says everything it is possible to say about a human being could be considered perfectly accurate for any one particular human being. For example:

"You are often happy. You are often sad. You are often angry. You had very strict parents. You had very easy-going parents. You were in a car accident when you were six. You were in a car accident when you were seven. You have never been in a car accident."

Upon looking at this, someone might register as hits:

• am often happy
• had strict parents
• never in car accident

By ignoring the misses and internal contradictions, you completely misconstrue the actual impressiveness of the profile. Obviously you can see how this is invalid. It's elementary statistical analysis we're talking about here.

Jesse

It's not a question of agreeing with me, it's a question of the valid way to determine the probability of getting a certain number of hits in statistics. If you have a series of N events which each have a probability p of being a "hit" by random chance, then the probability of getting n hits is given by the Binomial distribution (which you can find in any statistics textbook and on hundreds of webpages):

, where is the binomial coefficient given by

The details of this formula are not important, but what is important is that it includes both the sum of hits and misses (N) and the number of hits (n). If you throw out the misses and set N equal to n, you'll get a very different answer for the total probability. If you disagree with this equation, it's not me you're disagreeing with, it's the whole field of statistics--it'd be a bit like disagreeing with F=ma or E=mc^2.

Of course, if you would actually think for a moment about my example of a profile with 10 traits, each of which has a 50% chance of describing a randomly-selected member of the population, you'd see intuitively why throwing out the misses on a large collection of trials is obviously invalid. If I wrote 1000 different random traits that each apply to about 5% of the population, and 40 of them happened to be hits when I gave the profile to someone, would you say this was a resoundingly successful proof of my ability to predict a person's character, since the significance (counting only the hits) is 0.05^40 or about 1 in 10^54? If you don't feel like replying in detail to this post that's fine, but please at least answer this question with a simple "yes" or "no".