Re: virus: Objectivism vs Astrology in Cyberspace

Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Sun, 16 Feb 1997 21:38:22 GMT


At 14:45 16/02/97 -0600, Ken wrote:

>> The other test would be to find out what personality traits astrology's
>> mentioning, knock up a questionnaire designed to fish those traits out of
>> people, then run it on a large sample, asking for birthdate info.

[CleaP]

>With the multiplicity of methods for calculating the technojargon
>'houses' [I think at least 12 are extant], I think scientific testing
>[even limited to their framework] would be useful. If I were to
>believe, my bet would be on the only one that doesn't shatter at the
>Arctic/Antartic circles....
>
>Computing a horoscope from a date of birth, without any other data, is
>NAIVE. That's like predicting air time for a basketball to 10
>significant digits, and having only only 1 significant digit in the
>initial velocity.

Well yeh, but... astrology could be only 1 sig fig accurate (eg) and still
confer a benefit on people... meaning that if someone's horoscope is
/ballpark/ accurate then it might not let you predict their behaviour more
than 1% of the time, but that's still better than chance.

What?! I'm DEFENDING the validity of astrology? I've got to get this
argumentative shit under control!

Dave Pape
============================================================================
Ran out of sig. ideas.

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