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Chargement... A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for our Destiny in Datapar Alexander Boxer
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"An illuminating look at the surprising history and science of astrology, civilization's first system of algorithms, from Babylon to the present day. Humans are pattern-matching creatures, and astrology is our grandest pattern-matching game. In this refreshing work of history and analysis, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines classical texts on astrology to expose its underlying scientific and mathematical framework. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world's most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history's most brilliant minds from Ptolemy to al- Kindi to Kepler. A "scheme of heaven," or horoscope, is recognized as pseudoscience today, but was once considered a cutting-edge scientific tool. Not only does Boxer trace different applications of horoscopes back to their origins, he also puts them to the test using modern data sets and statistical science, arguing that today's data scientists do work similar to astrologers of yore. At once critical, rigorous, and far-ranging, A Scheme of Heaven recontextualizes astrology as a vast, technological project-spanning continents and centuries-that foreshadowed our data-driven world today"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)133.509Philosophy and Psychology Parapsychology And Occultism Specific Topics Astrology Astrology -- historyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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A reason astrology hung on for so long had to do with the late development of statistical thinking. No one knew how to run a chi test or a regression; if they had it could have been thrown in the waste bin much earlier. The author playfully goes through the exercise, crunching the numbers on the star signs of Supreme Court Justices, eg. But he seems not much interested in the results, perhaps anticipating we wouldn't be either. Maybe that was an editorial choice because the slap-down empirical mood doesn't jibe with the generous spirit of the historical portions. Or else, maybe the choice to not press the statistical results was in recognition of the how arbitrarily the signs and coordinates and calendars that determine that "data" were drawn and redrawn over the centuries.
He suggests that although astrology was always bunk the reasons its critics gave for rejecting it were often weak. He endorses Carl Sagan's point that some theories later validated (eg, continental drift) were initially rejected because no conceivable mechanism could support them (tectonic plates were discovered only later), so we shouldn't have rejected astrology merely because we didn't know of a mechanism by which it could have worked. There's something to that, but I wish he had gone further into the "demarcation problem" and in philosophy of science, and how it has treated the paradigm pseudoscience that is astrology. He does cite Feyerabend's "The Strange Case of Astrology," but doesn't explain its content, which is an interesting takedown of both astrology and most of its critics.
Astrology is one of those subjects like psychic research: to the embarrassment of many it historically engaged some great thinkers. That makes it an interesting subject to trace through time, shining unusual sidelights on otherwise familiar developments and personalities in science. This book has a lot of value as a unusual history of thought and explanation of some related science, but it isn't--and, for reasons it hints at, couldn't be--the data scientific treatment it advertises itself as. ( )