Rex Kerr
3 min readSep 10, 2023

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Aaaaand you're still dodging because you still haven't provided a data set for a controlled retrospective, nor have you set out a carefully controlled set of predictions.

You can continue to insist that yes, indeed, astrologers were exactly right, they knew it, it's true, it really really is true, it's all bias because people want you to conform to the same standards of evidence as literally everyone else.

You talk about integrity, but you display none. You could be showing data, but instead you're strutting around saying you won the debate...because...you didn't provide any solid evidence?

Me: "Evidence please--predictions from before things happened!"

You: "No. Find it yourself. On YouTube, so you waste as much time as possible."

Me: "Ugh, fine. I'll do the best I can. <Spends hours.> Here, look, it's such a crummy fit that we don't need to worry about trying to quantify carefully."

You: "No, you found the wrong videos. I know of one that is a good fit. I won't show you, but I know of one."

Me: "That's only valid if you can't always find a good fit; I bet you can find one too because I think you'll find all sorts of things predicted. You need to show a robust pattern that is higher than one would predict from chance."

You: "I WIN I WIN, SCIENTISTS ARE SO BIASED! I WIN I WIN I WIN!"

Honestly, it's embarrassing.

I've set out three or four different ways in which you could present compelling data; some easy enough to do here with some effort, some which would take some work with a programmatic LLM interface. The closest you came was to tell me to look at the hundreds of videos on YouTube, which I wasn't even able to find, and for which you wanted to mis-score political upheaval as Covid, because it's oh-so-convenient to draw the target around where the arrow hits; and you (and others) put forth a claim that this was a once-in-3000-year thing, notwithstanding that a bunch of more important things of all sorts have happened in the last 3000 years, and the other things you say don't agree with the random YouTubers, and you never set out any targets in advance, just reserved the right to say whatever I did was wrong unless I agreed with you. I see no merit at all beyond the random encounter and random loot tables I used when I played D&D. ("Ohhh, it makes so much sense that the gnolls had the sword of sharpness.")

You can keep objecting to setting out anything precise enough to test, and it will continue to not be science because you're not subjecting things to a sufficiently rigorous test by the evidence.

And I suppose you will continue to complain and complain that astrology works so spectacularly well that it's the horrible, cruel bias of scientists that are keeping you from formulating a straightforward clearly-scored hypothesis so you can't document that astrology will pass basic tests of its validity.

But it will still be dodging over and over and over again, until you finally actually show a decent test. What's the control? What's the hypothesis? What are the distributions of predictions? And so on.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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