Ask HN: Is astrological data used in ML models?

2 points by hollowpython 3 years ago | 3 comments

A positive argument for astrology being true would be that a person's sign, natal chart or characteristics derived from it are used as attributes for machine learning models.

Is this happening? Do you know of any company which used it? I'm genuinely curious.

(On a similar note, another positive signal for astrology would be if companies like Meta offered this kind of data for filtering in targeted ads)

dbish 3 years ago |

It is not used for anything predictive (like filtering for ads) because it doesn’t mean anything real. There is no proof of any sort that astrological info about a person has any correlation with anything personality related, life impacting, etc. other then possibly whether they believe in it or not. It’s like asking if mood ring colors can be fed in to a system real time to improve understanding of a user. Nothing more then randomness being added

triyambakam 3 years ago |

That's a very interesting idea. I however don't know about anything in that space, but I would like to take this opportunity to share that the astrology that people are exposed to in the West, e.g. "Oh, you are a Virgo?! You must be <characteristic>" is considered wildly inaccurate and superficial in contrast to jyotish (Hindu astrology). It's fine if you still think Hindu astrology is woo-woo, but it much richer in depth than just one's "sun sign".

db48x 3 years ago |

Large ML models are trained on essentially all text ever written, or as much of it as the researchers can get their hands on. That includes all of the lies as well as the truths, not to mention works of fiction.

Astrology is bunk, and getting included in an ML model is not validation. It just means that the model will accurately reproduce the same kind of crap that a person would write.