Developing a scientific research protocol for jyotish

[Omkarnath]

One friend of mine contacted me and asked whether I would like to participate in a small research project, where he wants to research whether jyotish has any scientific validity or not.

Now we are discussing the research protocol.

He has suggested the following protocol:

The astrologer is given the birth data of 10 volunteering individuals. The astrologer would not know anything about the person except DOB, TOB and POB. Astrologer would make a reading and write a profile of each person. Once all 10 profiles are written, they would be numbered randomly, and would not have the birth data printed on them. The volunteering subjects would be requested to read all the 10 profiles, and to select one of them which suits them best.

This could work.
But: I am a bit concerned that the psychology of the volunteers may affect the results: If they are hard sceptics, they will not find any of the papers exactly correct, or they may purposefully select a wrong paper. And if they are happy-hippie type persons, they will find many papers that suit their personality and nature.

Of course only testing this will demonstrate us whether or not it will work.

Do you have other ideas how to develop a successful research protocol, which would demonstrate for the hard sceptic and for the scientific community that Jyotish works, that it really is a scientific method?

[chess]

Shrikanth,

I think there would be many challenges still:

1. Focus on 4th house for loss of mother
- As you said there are many different schools and practices. => Constraining method of solving might give results that are not reliable.
2. Selection of volunteers and asking them to interpret the results is really adding great deal of subjectivity.


I think a possible but a slightly harder way is to do this:


1. Take a dictum (you are more knowledgeable on these), like one you stated a few months back about child losing his mother and test it. This becomes the hypothesis.
2. How to test it, astro database has some information like marriage etc.. Run simulation extracting the information from the database and run it for lots of sample. This is the hard part.
3. See the results and interpret them

I think if we can find dictums that are straight forward and have to happen all the time then we have a much easier case to test. I think you could think of one more easily than anyone in the forum.

Regards
Chess

[chess]

Shrikanthji,

I think what you are suggesting would lead to resulting in relative knowledge of the astrologers and a comparison across methods. That is one way to do it, I agree.

BTW, you had viewed my horoscope some time ago regarding an accident and its cause. I wonder if you would do the favor once again but from a career standpoint, interested in your view point.

Here are my details:
DOB: 1st Oct 1975
TOB: 17:30
POB: Jaunpur, India

Would really appreciate it.

With respect
Regards
Chess

[Nitin21]

Astrology is more of an Art than science. Coming up with right numbers with relation to degrees, distances, casting divisional charts etc is predictable and hence science can help. But for qualitative predictions, I don't think so. Because, one of the nimittas of a good astrologer is to predict through his Vak Siddhi and Intuition. This does not cut well with science.

My two cents.

Regards
Sonu