Police Study: Astrological Evidence in Tail of Normal Distribution

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SUMMARY

The discussion centers on a police study that claims astrological signs correlate with arrest rates, specifically noting that Aries individuals are arrested most frequently. The analysis reveals that the data follows a Gaussian distribution, and the study's conclusions are criticized as an example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, where arbitrary significance is assigned to outliers. The probability of a month having 203 or more arrests is calculated at 3.4%, suggesting that annual variations in arrest rates are likely more significant than astrological influences.

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  • Familiarity with the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
  • Basic knowledge of astrology and its claims
  • Experience with probability calculations
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This discussion is beneficial for statisticians, skeptics of pseudoscience, and individuals interested in the intersection of astrology and data analysis.

Jack21222
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Astrological "evidence" produced by looking at the tails of a normal distribution

I just ran across this on a large news aggregation website, so I'm sure some people here might have seen it as well.

http://www.inquisitr.com/173752/jail-time-predetermined-by-astrology-signs-says-police-study/

But just because the police don’t see the value in such a list doesn’t mean that the pattern isn’t there. Georgia Nicols, who writes the National Post’s horoscope, said that it isn’t surprising to her that Aries are arrested the most.

“Aries is the sign of the warrior. Aries rules the military. Aries jump in head first, and love adventure. A lot of people in the newsroom are Aries.”

If you look at the data, it appears to be a gaussian distribution, which shouldn't be too surprising. They just picked one of the tails (and it isn't even an extreme outlier, maybe 1 or 2 sigma, I haven't done the math) and are trying to attach some significance to it.

This is commonly known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, where this article is drawing a bullseye around the outlier.

I'm sure this isn't the first time people have tried using outliers in a normal distribution to show evidence for astrology (or any number of other woo-woo claims). So, it's important to keep your tools sharp in your baloney detection kit, and keep an eye out for this sort of thing.
 
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The probability that the worst month will have 203 or more arrests is calculable, and is 3.4%. I can't get excited about that.
 


I'm willing to bet that if they tracked data for multiple years, the annual variation would be similar to or exceed variation based on birth date.