dear RR ji,

           well how r u getting on with my chart...?

        You asked the author of this thread what made him say astrology is acccurate. allow me to say a few words too. As a doctor, being an individual of scientific temper, it isn't the done thing for me to believe in the crap called jyothish...! but here I'm, being a resolute believer of the art called Astrology...!

           The roots for my belief go back to the time, when a  friend of mine totally impressed me with a prediction of my nature and values in life by using my sunsign accdg to western astrology. That started me of on a journey and love with astrology and Jyothish, that has continued till this day.

             there were many instances during my journey when i received more confirmation of the inherent truth in the Real Astrologyof the seers.

       the time when me and my friend visited a NADI jyothish Centre near Kanchipuram, tamilnadu. The center did not have my chart, but they were so accurate with the reading of my friend's chart, selected using his thumbprint. they gave us his exact name, his parents' name, the names of his siblings. well, tht instance really converted me into a die-hard believer of Jyothish.

       and so many more instances....! after having read in a book tht a swathi asterism and a sixth place raahu will give rise to all sorts of illnesses for the native, remembering my long-suffering brother who is a swathi native and looking into his horoscope, i see tht his Rahu position is exactly in the sixth house....
 
this sort of accuracy is what made me a believer.

Dear Sir,

Your chart has been placed in the queue.

I was not questioning the accuracy of jyotish but wished to know a bit more about the reason for his belief that jyotish is of high precision. Hope you see the difference!

That said, here are a few of my thoughts which may or may not jive with what your framework is.

When I say 'astrology' I am using in in not an inclusive sense. I am including then only the rational, logical, technical and therefore transferable part of astrology. In other words, the factors, the rules and so on.

In a reading though other factors also operate such as intuition, and in many cases siddhis etc. Those while useful should not be considered as part of astrology or at least the astrological part of a reading. That said, in a reading it is often not as clear cut where logic ends and the paralogical begins but the two components must not be muddled together when describing the process, in a discussion such as is happening here.

Nadis are interesting, since they do not follow the standard rules nor utilize them. If there is an astro-logical component it is either secret or not known. If one digs around a bit lot of instances of failed nadi readings also surface, however, out of politeness or some sort of psychological fear of the occult processes, the failures are not discussed or even mentioned. Let us face the fact that all occult vidyas including astrology has a certain component which for lack of better term gets lumped into the label of superstition but is really the 'mystical/unexplainable' part of the process.

Finally, while this 'soft' and somewhat undefinable, mystical part (including secrets and intuition) while essential to the process of giving a prediction is also a variable that varies considerable from person to person and creates a performance distribution curve that has significant kurtosis (very flat and not bell-shaped). Sadly, the technical part is not black and white either and yes examples like you gave do occur but if you look for the same variable (rahu in sixth or whatever) in several charts, the frequency of 'hits' goes down.

I realize a lot of people do not care about or worry about it and all this might be sounding too picky or anal to them but unlike most other divinatory crafts, astrology has the highest number of rules and more defined technical nature. I call it technical because it is transferable and anyone can learn without having special powers or abilities. Having those does help but not essential.

Sorry for the long post -- I realize you must be very busy.

RR




[quote="jaydoc"]dear RR ji,

           well how r u getting on with my chart...?

        You asked the author of this thread what made him say astrology is acccurate. allow me to say a few words too. As a doctor, being an individual of scientific temper, it isn't the done thing for me to believe in the crap called jyothish...! but here I'm, being a resolute believer of the art called Astrology...!

           The roots for my belief go back to the time, when a  friend of mine totally impressed me with a prediction of my nature and values in life by using my sunsign accdg to western astrology. That started me of on a journey and love with astrology and Jyothish, that has continued till this day.

             there were many instances during my journey when i received more confirmation of the inherent truth in the Real Astrologyof the seers.

       the time when me and my friend visited a NADI jyothish Centre near Kanchipuram, tamilnadu. The center did not have my chart, but they were so accurate with the reading of my friend's chart, selected using his thumbprint. they gave us his exact name, his parents' name, the names of his siblings. well, tht instance really converted me into a die-hard believer of Jyothish.

       and so many more instances....! after having read in a book tht a swathi asterism and a sixth place raahu will give rise to all sorts of illnesses for the native, remembering my long-suffering brother who is a swathi native and looking into his horoscope, i see tht his Rahu position is exactly in the sixth house....
 
this sort of accuracy is what made me a believer.[/quote]

well RRji, it looks like you are the ideal person to begin working on a statistical paper tht examines the accuracy of Jyothish when applied to a wide range of the general populace.. kurtosis and skewed distributions...! anyway i have already told you abt tht i suppose.

on a serious note, what do you say to such a paper. we could take up some of the interesting and so-called established cornerstone principles of astrology - and make an unbiased case study of many charts and publish our findings on how true they are.

i being a pediatrician can help with accurate birthtimes of many babies. we could have a study on the principles of Baalarishta, for example.

what do you say...!

why no reply RRji...?

anything wrong with wht i said...?

Dr. Jay,

Thanks for your kind offer and kind words of praise. I also got your sequela to your email and also the private email after that. No there was nothing wrong in what you proposed. The delay was because of our time difference. When you wake up, I go to sleep, when you come back home and write on the net, I am deep asleep (most nights!) and so on.

First of all, I am hardly knowledgeable in statistics. Something like jyotish would need a high degree of knowledge and familiarity with non-parametric stats, similar to what is necessary for a epidemiological study or a clinical trial.

Then there is another issue which is even bigger and more crucial in my reckoning. Psychology, forensic psychiatry for instance are very heavily statistic-dependent pursuits. They are very good at predicting behaviour in cohorts and groups but their predictability falls severely when the rules are applied to individuals. In some ways medicine is also similar where disease outcomes, treatment results when looking at a group of individuals are fairly accurate. However when it comes to individual patients sometimes the predictability falls down or becomes less certain if only the medical rules and techniques are utilized. Good doctors too have good intuitions and it helps their patients.

Astrology, on the other hand, is quite opposite in that sense. It works a lot better for the individual but does not do too well when a group is studied. Isn't it strange? Case studies, therefore in jyotish are of more utility than studying a group and trying to figure out strong indicators, using statistics.

What I am saying is possibly counterintuitive and even running against logic, a rational scientific mind may think. But certainly the last word has not been said on this matter/topic yet. I have read some of the groups and other people's research and sure there are correlations discovered and sets of rules produced; however when it comes to cold testing they do not always come across successfully. For predictive purposes, in other words, they do not really help a lot. The same fact is also highlighted in nearly all jyotish classics. Multiple combinations are given for each indication and while overall they do hit often, success rate of individual or small groups of such rules do not really work in the field with a high degree of accuracy.

I realize that this is something that is hard to swallow for a jyotishi and I would have been called to the Panchayat for such heresy, if these were the old days!

RR



[quote="jaydoc"]well RRji, it looks like you are the ideal person to begin working on a statistical paper tht examines the accuracy of Jyothish when applied to a wide range of the general populace.. kurtosis and skewed distributions...! anyway i have already told you abt tht i suppose.

on a serious note, what do you say to such a paper. we could take up some of the interesting and so-called established cornerstone principles of astrology - and make an unbiased case study of many charts and publish our findings on how true they are.

i being a pediatrician can help with accurate birthtimes of many babies. we could have a study on the principles of Baalarishta, for example.

what do you say...![/quote]