They came to believe that the horoscope predicted true love. It was actually a bug in the 2001 British census.
When searching a new lovethere are many people who are looking for the best possible compatibility, but not only in terms of tastes or hobbies, but also to the zodiac sign that corresponds to each of the people. Nowadays there are dating applications that allow you to filter by zodiac sign, since it is not uncommon to see or hear that being a Leo or Scorpio sign is something catastrophic. But science has something to say here. Demonstrating it. When asked if the zodiac sign affects the compatibility that exists in a couple, researcher David Voas wanted to give him an answer to see if it is a definitive tool or not. And to do so, he analyzed a sample of 20 million people from the census of England and Wales, which is equivalent to 10 million couples. This way, if there is any relationship in such a large sample, it has to be seen somehow. And here we didn’t want to see if the fire signs get along with each other, but rather something more basic: is there any combination of signs that occurs more or less frequently than pure chance dictates? The first results. At first glance at the different couples analyzed, it seemed that the astrologers were right and that people were grouped according to the affinity of their zodiac signs. But the truth is that the researcher did not stop at this and continued digging into the data in order to see if there was something more. The real results. Upon further investigation, he discovered that this “astrological sign” did not come from the cosmos, but from imputation errors and biases in the collection of census data. Here he observed that in records where the exact day of birth was missing, officials used to assume that it was the 1st day of the month by default, which generated artificial accumulations of people in certain signs and created patterns that were not real. With all this, it was seen that many apparently compatible couples were simply sharing registration errors or rounded birth dates, which is something quite common within the administration. And once these statistical artifacts were corrected and matches by birth month were separated from matches that actually crossed the boundary between zodiac signs, the effect disappeared completely. In short, there was no trace of a “force” that united the signs. It’s always the same. This new research sits in a long tradition of scientific attempts to validate astrology in some way, and the truth is that it always comes to the same conclusion: there is no relationship. As Carlos Orsi explains in his work published by Columbia University Press, the problem with couple astrology is that not even astrologers themselves agree, since there is no homogeneous theory about which combinations are “good.” And given this lack of consensus, the Voas test is the fairest possible: look for any deviation from chance. And chance won by a landslide. Images | lookstudio in Magnific freepik In Xataka | Esperanza Gracia had been explaining the horoscope to the Spanish for three decades. Its closure illustrates a deeper change
