Godot

And the technical term for this folks, is a ludicrously high sampling error. Opportunistic sampling is one thing, so long as the sub-group selected is approximately randomised and representative of the greater population. But to intentionally exclude people in order to beef up your results is an inexcusably poor tactic! And you wonder why the scientific community has no respect for pseudoscience.
Translation: you're not a statistician, so your poignant and precise criticisms of my methodology are invalid.
But Volker, since you are the one making the positive claim here, such parameters are yours to make (and substantiate).

Quote:

Astrology must be a terrible thing, that it is ignored by skeptics in total.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this something of a non-sequitur? Skeptics in general are likely to be ambivalent towards astrology. I tend to ignore it simply because the underlying concept of my life being controlled by planetary alignment to be ... well, idiotic and self-centered.

Secular Pinoy

Wake me up, dear astrologer, when you have given actual evidence for your craft. All these running around ignoring pointed criticisms and engaging in voodoo statistics are getting boring real fast. BTW, thanks for visiting my site.

Volker.Doormann

No one is able to recognize truth without own cognition on the matter. You cannot reject GR without following the relations in detail with your own consciousness, but you do it on astrology. There is no reason, why. Please checkout to know more then this politic argument:
home.arcor.de/p.goemmel/astrology.htm First results:
www.anomalistik.de/0512.htm I'm not involved in anyway in this test.

Volker

Volker.Doormann

The typical skeptic is skeptical of the paranormal, other people, and is not skeptical of skepticism. The true skeptic is skeptical of the normal, himself, and of skepticism.
Deborah Frisch

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55)

It’s one thing not to see the forest for the trees, but then to go on to deny the reality of the forest is a more serious matter.
Paul Weiss

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance of things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788-1860)

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge; it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin, Introduction, The Descent of Man (1871).

There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I am attacked by two very opposite sects - the scientists and the know-nothings. Both laugh at me - calling me “the frogs’ dancing-master.” Yet I know that I have discovered one of the greatest forces in nature.
Luigi Galvani, Italian physicist (1737-1798)

Skeptics in general are likely to be ambivalent towards astrology. I tend to ignore it simply because the underlying concept of my life being controlled by planetary alignment to be ... well, idiotic and self-centered.
Godot

Godot

Thanks for the links Volker! I had a brief look at the first one and wasn't too impressed. The second one is of no use to me since I only know enough german to swear at you or ask for more beer. Thanks anyways.

I also appreciate your gesture of including me on your list of rather august personages. I'm touched to be found in such a rarefied environment.

If you agree with any of the quotations you posted, I would suspect you might be something of a nihilist....

Godot

Another thought:
with regard to the significance of Lobstrosity's results, would you care to provide us with the mathematics preformed that prove that 24 positive "hits" out of 40 statements is significant to any degree?
The veracity of each statement (as ambiguous as they are) can be summarised as simply "yes" ("hit") or "no" ("miss") responses. You now have a 50% chance of being either right or wrong on each individual item. Random chance in a binary system should get a "hit" on average 50% of the time.
On a 40 statement list, pure chance should get 20/40 "hits" most of the time.
Volker: how were you able to determine that 24/40 was significantly different from 20/40 in this circumstance? Hint: you can't.


In order to test the variability of responses, all you need is a random number generator. I doubt that 24/40 will be considered significantly different from 20/40 even at p< 0.001 (assuming you could provide sufficient data to achieve this level of significance).

Jesse

No, "pure chance" does not mean a 50-50 probability, it just means that events follow some probability distribution. For example, if each statement applied to about 25% of the population, then we'd expect a ratio of 10/40 hits by "pure chance", on average.

Anyway, Volker doesn't care about the ratio of hits to misses, just the raw number of hits. He apparently thinks 24 hits has the same significance regardless of how many misses there were (whether 16 or 1,000,000). He's a mathematical ignoramus, in other words.

Godot

I should have clarified. I was thinking along the lines of your earlier coin flip analogy. Flip a coin 40 times, odds are you'll get 20 heads and 20 tails (simplified, I know). If the 40 statements are taken as hit or miss, then we should get 20/40 if performed a sufficient number of times. The fact that these statements are intentionally nebulous and many are contradictory increases the likelihood of a >20/40 result. Of courser, I'm also approaching this from the perspective of an undefined, general population that was properly sampled.

Quote:

Anyway, Volker doesn't care about the ratio of hits to misses, just the raw number of hits. He apparently thinks 24 hits has the same significance regardless of how many misses there were (whether 16 or 1,000,000). He's a mathematical ignoramus, in other words.

I guess context is irrelevant.

Volker.Doormann

Please give a proof of your claim evaluating the hole plot adequate.

Because I think, that it is stupid to believe in, that a random generator is all one needs to distinguish truth from untruth, I have given up discussing. If one can show by evidence, that a random generator is all one needs to discriminate the truth from untruth in this plot, please e-mail me.

Volker

Godot

It appears as though you will not be bothering to read this Volker, but I will post nevertheless.
My suggestion of using a random number generator would be to simulate a larger sample size in order to obtain a mean as well as to obtain a standard curve. It was suggested to work within the constuct of Jesse's analogy coin flips. From this, it would not be difficult to judge whether or not a response of 24/40 would differ significantly from the mean.
No more, no less. I purport to make no statement of claim regarding "distinguish[ing] truth from untruth" so that is something of a strawman on your part.
Besides, statistics has nothing to say about truth or untruth, only mathematics.