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 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.