Re: icy dwarfs: methodology

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aquirata wrote:Juan,
You describe a structured approach to research, which is very commendable. Few people take the time and make the effort to go through all that trouble.
It caught my attention that you don't consider size to be a factor. Surely this will be very difficult to justify in light of the myriad celestial bodies one is faced with when there is no cut-off point. One cannot deny that the Sun and Moon influence our lives much more than e.g. Pluto does. I would also submit that the five other ancient planets will outweigh the evidence of any other planet, dwarf planet, asteroid or what have you, given equivalent circumstances.
The large numbers is a question of selection criteria, of methodology. The luminaries mean one thing, the planets another, and their distance is interpreted in terms of meaning not in terms of "influence". I don't think that the idea that Astrology has to do with physical influence in relation to distance and physical size has any ground.
On the methodology itself, I see three potential roadblocks. Selection of the most significant moment will be open to interpretation, so you will have to work extra hard to make the definitions and methodology as unambiguous as possible.
"selecting the most significant moment" is what astrologers do all the time, and it is a matter of choosing the time for which to make the radix (e.g. the time of birth, the start of an event...). Nothing new is required here.
Moreover, you will need to collect and analyze not just hundreds but thousands of cases in order to make your results statistically significant.
It is quite the opposite. Except for the weighting technique, this is standard qualitative methodology applied in many fields, particularly the social sciences. We are dealing with meanings, not with measurable forces. It is a method designed to work with a small number of cases, from which the characteristics of the planet can be figured out through analytic induction, theoretical sampling, content analysis, etc.
And finally, you will need to avoid selection bias; in other words, the charts selected will have certain configurations in terms of planets, aspects, signs, houses, etc.
The selection is done through the weighting technique I outlined. There is no selection bias in the chart itself, since the methodology is designed to avoid it. There is a bias however when choosing the population in which the required cases are going to be found: the cases chosen must be sufficiently documented, otherwise they will be useless, and this limitation can be interpreted as a "bias".

Of course, there will be bias at the time of interpreting the results, building the planet keywords, etc.
You will need to be able to prove that the distribution of these configurations is 'random', i.e. they do not affect the result
Not when you are using qualitative methods and a very small population.

Your comment makes me wonder: why do astrologers assume that the only valid way of doing research in Astrology is using statistical methods?

Juan