I would really doubt that it is zero, the relative position of the celestial bodies correlates with season. All sorts of human activities follow a yearly cycle, including birth rates and mortality rates. I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality.
I would take it further and say a good principle is that "everything is correlated with everything else", it is just a matter of the strength of the relationship. I will probably get downmodded for that, because it is in direct conflict the "null hypothesis" testing paradigm that has dominated data analysis for the last half century or so.
However there aren't correlations between those known correlations and the traits that astrology says that you should have. Therefore there is no known correlation between your astrological description and your personality. And yes, people have attempted to measure this.
'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.' https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf
"One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square" http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38...
"...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p < 10–6)." http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...
For example what songs you like is tied to what media you watch which is tied to what politics you have. And most of that is tied to how liberal vs conservative you are.
It doesn't take many principal components to make most of the remaining correlations very small.
But correlations between astrological descriptions and personality start off small. So small that astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people.
I never said it was. My problem is with the prevailing philosophy of doing statistical tests on whether there is exactly zero effect/correlation, ie testing for deviation from noise/chance. It is the most destructive idea ever pushed by mathematicians.
There's no evidence of this, so you should have doubts.
EG: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151
I don't know much about astrology, but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? From my understanding, it is basically a way of binning together sets of birthdays. There will probably be various artifacts and noise introduced by the binning process, but I am sure with large enough sample size you will see the correlation.
> I don't know much about astrology,
Now we agree.
I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though.
I can correlations the drop in pirates with a rise in global temperature, so what... correlations don't mean a damn thing by themselves, that's just data-mining bias.
Then please kindly don't defend it.
but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right?
I have actually studied astrology. Serious astrologers loathe sun sign astrology.
However you don't need anything so complex for such a starting point. A classic demonstration that I saw was a large group of people who marked where they were on two lines. The first was how organized you were. The second was how extroverted you were. Based on this we divided into 4 groups, and began talking. It was surprising how much people in each group had in common. And how differently the groups behaved. The groups were:
Introverted and disorganized: Supporter. Good shoulder to cry on.
Introverted and organized: Analyst. They make good accountants.
Extroverted and disorganized: Promoter. High energy, lots of ideas, not a lot of carry through.
Extroverted and organized: Controller. They generally relate to, "My way or the highway."
I was in the Promoter quadrant. One of the things we had in common was that our spaces look like a tornado just tore through it, but please don't clean up because then we won't know where anything is. :-)