Tag: vector length

Moron Astrology

So this morning I was discussing my yesterday’s post on astrology and vector length with good friend and esteemed colleague Baada. Some interesting fundaes came out of it. Since Baada has given up blogging (and he’s newly married now so can’t expect him to blog) I’m presenting the stuff here.

So basically we believe that astrology started off as some kind of multinomial regression. Some of ancestors observed some people, and tried to predict their behaviour based on the position of their stars at the time of their birth. Maybe it started off as some arbit project. Maybe if blogs existed then, we could say that it started off as a funda session leading up to a blog post.

So a bunch of people a few millenia ago started off on this random project to predict behaviour based on position of stars at the time of people’s birth. They used a set of their friends as the calibration data, and used them to fix the parameters. Then they found a bunch of acquaintances who then became the test data. I’m sure that these guys managed to predict behaviour pretty well based on the stars – else the concept wouldn’t have caught on.

Actually it could have gone two ways – either it fit an extraordinary proportion of people in which case it would be successful; or it didn’t fit a large enough proportion of people in which case it would have died out. Our hunch is that there must have been several models of astrology, and that natural selection and success rates picked out one as the winner – none of the other models would have survived since they failed to predict as well on the initial data set.

So Indian astrology as we know it started off as a multinomial regression model and was the winner in a tournament of several such models, and has continued to flourish to this day. Some problem we find with the concept:

  • correlation-causation: what the initial multinomial regression found is that certain patterns in the position of stars at the time of one’s birth is heavily correlated with one’s behaviour. The mistake that the modelers and their patrons made was the common one of associating correlation with causation. They assumed that the position of stars at one’s birth CAUSED one’s behaviour. They probably didn’t do much of a rigorous analysis to test this out
  • re-calibration: another problem with the model is that it hasn’t been continuously recalibrated. We continue to use the same parameters as we did several millenia ago. Despite copious quantities of new data points being available, no one has bothered to re-calibrate the model. Times have changed and people have changed but the model hasn’t kept up with either. Now, I think the original information of the model has been lost so no one can recalibrate even if he/she chooses to

Coming back to my earlier post, one can also say that Western astrology is weaker than Indian astrology since the former uses a one-factor regression as against the multinomial regression used by the latter; hence the former is much weaker at predicting.

What’s your Raashee? Astrology and Vector Length

The problem with western astrology is that there are way too few categories of people according to it. Western astroogy uses a vector of length one – the part of year in which you were born in, and then concocts a story based on that. According to that, people can be classified into twelve categories (as can be seen in the great recent movie whose title is a substring of the title of this blog post) and you can tell their story based on that. Thing is that way too many people you know, and are not like you, are in the same category as you, and this makes things so much less believable.

On the other hand, the beauty of Indian astrology is the vector length that is involved with it. There are nine planets (including the Sun and the Moon, not including the Earth, and with Rahu and Ketu instead of Uranus and Neptune) and at the time of your birth, each of them can be in one of 10 houses (not sure of the number but I think this is it). There are correlation issues so the number of possible combinations isn’t as big as you think it might be, but still there are enough possible combinations that can describe each person you know uniquely!

This ability to identify almost each person uniquely is what makes Indian astrology so fascinating. Stuff is so complicated that you will never understand it. And because you will never understand it, you are more likely to believe it; unlike in western astrology where it is easy for you to see where you fit in, where things are so easy that it is easy for you to see through it.

The other thing about Indian astrology is that given the really large number of variables, it is easy for the astrologer to correct his own mistakes. He will say “Jupiter is in position 7 so X will happen” and then if X doesn’t happen he says “yeah i predicted it based on Jupiter being in 7, but then in the meantime the Sun moved into 8, and so death happened off”. It makes things so easy to cover up that it contributes to the mystique, and to the success of the art.

So a possible moral of the story is that if you want to create fraud frameworks, make sure that they involve long vectors. Make sure that you design them in such a way that the mango person won’t understand; Make sure that you build in enough variables that will allow you to cover up in case when you screw up. Make sure the vectors in your framework are long enough to make the users feel special and unique, yet giving them a feel that you’ve seen someone/something similar before.

I think this is what all the successful consulting firms have done. Perfected this art of coming up with this kind of a vector. And to think that they might have been inspired by Indian astrology..