It looks like a lot of Kyosti Tarvainen's articles were published in the astrological journal
Correlations. You might have to be a subscriber to access them.
http://www.correlationjournal.com/ However, when I clicked on "current issue," it was from 2018. Anyone know if
Correlations is still active?
Basically, IMO, astrology is a complex system. Extremely so. I don't think it lends itself to simple analyses. I agree that today's more powerful computers can handle a lot more complexity, and we need to look at how thousands of variables interact. We can't just isolate one or two factors and hope to get meaningful results.
Also, some people believe that astrology is a system of divination. That takes the discussion out of the realm of statistics and into the mind of the astrologer.
Reviving an old thread here, but the more I think about and practice astrology, the more I come to think that astrology is a form of divination.
Astrology being an objective quality of the world is highly doubtful imo. Astrology spits in the face of what we know about physics and even if there were evidence of forces emitted by the planets that influence humans, the claims to knowledge that astrologers make are dubious.
Let's say that there was evidence that planets emitted a force that had a measurable impact on human behavior. Could we from that say that we could therefore predict a person's behavior, finances, career etc based only on the time and place they were born? If we could, shouldn't it be easy for astrologers to show in a concise, clear manner that these things can be predicted?
We don't have evidence of any such force and on top of that, astrologers are generally pretty bad at presenting concise evidence that the techniques even work. A lot of the "evidence" are just astrologers reading what they want to see into a chart in an inconsistent manner. That's not science, that's divination. Astrology relies on the ability to see patterns in abstract symbolism and apply those patterns to the answering of a question concerning a person, a specific situation, or even a nation. That's divination.
Ok, but what about the correlations found that are suspiciously only published in astrological journals? That's all well and good, but without any mechanism, those correlations are very dubious. What's more is that when meta-analyses are done, those statistically significant effects vanish. If there were astrological effects, this wouldn't happen. But let's say that the astrological effects were to remain in the most demanding of meta-analyses, that still raises the question of how something like astrology could work in the first place or how such a powerful influence could somehow go undetected.
Leaving the science to the wayside for a moment, just observe the way astrology is done. It is 90% ad-hoc in nature. Astrologers are very inconsistent in the manner of making predictions and will often ignore the misses and hold the hits in their memories. Astrologers tend to look for what sticks out to them in a chart when asked a question. That's not science, that's divination. If one were to apply the techniques of astrology in a mechanical fashion one would quickly see that the techniques themselves don't work. Human pattern seeking ability and our capacity for induction are the engine that get the car of astrology running.
That said, I love astrology and I practice it. It's incredible when it appears to work, and the hits are very addictive. But I can't in good conscience claim that it's anything but a complicated form of divination. Heck, even the historical evidence backs that up. Up until Ptolemy, astrology was rarely seen as a natural science, but more as a form of omen watching.
There's something fascinating going on with astrology, but I don't think it has anything to do with the natural sciences. I think the cause of the apparent astrological effects are to be found within the realm of psychology and anthropology. That doesn't in any way diminish astrology imo.