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On Monday, May 14, 2001, 2:11:07 PM, Norman Winski wrote:
>> On Monday, May 14, 2001, 10:59:07 AM, Norman Winski wrote:
>>
>> NW> Yes, Mars had a 1.7 year cycle. Does the Cattle market make an
>> NW> extreme low everytime Mars gets to Taurus? No. But, when Cattle
>> NW> does get to an extreme and Mars is entering Taurus, there is a
>> NW> good track record for an important turn for Cattle prices.
>>
>> Is this track record expressable as a statistical result? If so, this
>> would help bridge the system/astro understanding gap. :-)
>>
>> ztrader,
NW> Good question and I eagerly await your results.
Actually, YOU have this 'track record', not me. I can't reproduce
something you did without knowing exactly what it was. If you tell me
the number of times it was true, and the number of times it was false,
along with the criteria you use to determine T/F, I can help to put
this in stat terms.
Another possibility is that this track record is not based on
statistical thinking. Most people do NOT think statistically. I
discovered this many years ago, when a couple of books on "Biorhythms"
came out. Essentially, the books were a collection of hundreds of
*carefully selected* events in the lives of famous people. The events
were selected to show that such events happen on the day that would be
predicted by "biorhythms". There were ZERO examples of events where
"biorhythms" made the wrong prediction.
I got interested in this and talked with many people about the book.
Just about everyone said that the examples in the book were
overwhelming proof that "biorhythms" worked as the book said - most
people were totally convinced. Thousands, if not millions, of people
started using them to predict what would happen in their lives (and
the book author, offering a service to do this, made a LARGE amount of
money). :-) This might remind us of some system vendors who select
published trades carefully to get us to buy their system. :-)
I collected a data base of events, NOT selected, and ran some
statistics on a non-selected set of examples. Sure enough,
"biorhythms" were unable to predict anything. There was a huge
difference between what people thought/believed, and what was
statistically valid. This really made it clear, to me, how
non-statistical people really are in their thinking.
One possibility is that astro people do not think statistically about
the events they are looking at. A few successful examples seem to
work, and the perhaps larger set of cases that did not work are not
examined rigorously. This is *not* meant to be derogatory toward astro
people, because so very few people think statistically. I am bringing
this up to help explain the astro/systems understanding gap. What do
you think? Could this be why there is such a gap?
ztrader
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