This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
I have a friend who believes in the power of astrological interpretation, and does so because of extensive personal experience as a practitioner and (at least allegedly) from alternate history / alternate cosmology reasons. This person is, obviously, not part of the Rationalist / Neo-Enlightenment movement; but does at least seem to me to be perfectly intelligent (this person, along with their spouse (who I suspect is humoring them as I've never heard a word positive or negative on the spouse) have homeschooled their children to great effect, including the eldest well on track to get into college early by good test scores).
The astrologer was not offended at my suggestion that the Barnum Effect could be clouding their mind more than they realize, and actually asked what it would take to resolve my skepticism. We are now mildly adversarial co-experimentors, but unfortunately neither of us is credentialed in statistics or sociology. (I have an undergraduate math minor including 200-level Statistics, but that's about it.)
Our current experiment design is: I'll round up around 50-100 people not known to the astrologer; then the astrologer will do a “reading” (directed to look for any amount of high-confidence information on any topic about the subject's life between birth and up to 1 year in the future) on the “birth chart” of each (anonymized) subject; then the astrologer will work another experimenter to break each of these “readings” up into a set of atomic, itemized claims; finally, I'll give each subject a shuffled list of their own claims mixed in with the claims from 2 random strangers' “readings” (1 of which is constrained to be from a stranger who is within 15% of the subject's own age, 1 of which is constrained to be from a stranger who is not to be within 15% of the subject's own age) and ask them to rank each on a Likert scale.
If there's no clear separations between any of the rating groups, I'll offer my condolences. If there's a clear separation between the “own” ratings and “control non-cohort” ratings but not “own” and “control cohort”, I'll offer an "I told you so". And if there's a clear separation between the “own” ratings and “control cohort” ratings, I'll start entering counterfactual universes.
Is there anything else we should consider before doing this? We can get help from a statistician after the hard part's done, but if our statistician says "goddamnit, you should go back in time and make this adjustment to the way you ran the experiment" I'm trying to receive that message now.
EDIT: my friend believes that astrology predicts much, much more than the lives of individuals, so I'd considered just suggesting they open a Polymarket account (pre-registering the specific account ID to avoid selection cheese) and start killing it on there for 2 years. But, obviously, even if that might raise eyebrows, it could never rule out the possibility that my friend is a perfectly mundane “Superforecaster” simply laundering their abilities through astrological charts, because this astrologer claims there is a large skill-based component to astrological interpretation.
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