I am not really a big Olympics fan. I used to be, but then they started letting pro athletes play, and the "pageantry" became ridiculous, and now China is hosting them and using them as a political tool in a way that strongly reminds me of 1938 1936. I thought it couldn’t sink much lower.
But I was wrong, of course. Because, it turns out, astrology rules the Olympics! At least, it does according to a totally credulous article posted by Reuters, which parrots a bunch of silly claims by "statistician" Kenneth Mitchell — that’s in quotation marks, because his statistics are very, very suspect.
This kind of article steams me pretty well. It is written slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it still simply repeats without any rebuttal the Mitchell’s statements, which are easily shown to be false. I’d go into details, but happily Josh Giersch already has, and quite well. From Mitchell’s bad math to the cherry-picking of data, Josh slams him pretty hard.
There is one thing I want to mention, though. In the article, Mitchell says something totally bogus:
Explaining his eureka moment with all the zeal of a statistical crusader, he concluded: “Did you know that the distribution of Olympic swimming medallists against the tropical astrological zodiac signs can be almost exactly mapped by a polynomial function of the third degree?
“That’s one to shut people up at a pub.”
Actually, I’m sure it would, since most people don’t know what a polynomial is, and thus can be bamboozled by such a falacious use of math. A polynomial is a function (like y = 8x3 – x2 + 3x + 6) that can be used to plot points on a graph. It can also be used backwards, so to speak, using the points from a series of measurements to derive the equation. So you can measure some series of events — like the astrological signs of Olympic winners — and then find a polynomial equation that best describes them.
The thing is, in general the higher the order of the polynomial (the biggest exponent of x), the easier it is to fit the points. A third degree polynomial (like the one above) can be fiddled with easily to fit a series like that very well, no matter what the points really are. In other words, whether or not astrology is correct (and it ain’t), if you plot the birth signs of the athletes, you are very apt to find a third-degree polynomial that’ll fit the points. You can swap around the dates, pick the losers instead of winners, or measure the athlete’s hair length and still find some polynomial that describes them pretty well.
So what Mitchell said is meaningless; it only sounds cool. It’s an empty claim, just like all of astrology. I’m not surprised he said it, but what really irks me is that the Reuters reporter swallowed it wholesale. I dream of a world when journalists actually do some research for their articles. I’ll be dreaming a long, long time.
Too bad these are the summer games. Otherwise, I could make a joke about astro-luge-y.
August 20th, 2008 at 10:48 am
As we say in physics, “With enough free parameters, you can fit an elephant.” (It must be paraphrased from someone well-known, but that’s the way I’ve always heard it.)
August 20th, 2008 at 10:49 am
I think you meant the 1936 Olympics in the first paragraph there.
August 20th, 2008 at 10:52 am
I dream of a world when journalists actually do some research for their articles.
Or, indeed, a world in which everyone knows what a polynomial is and what you can do with them. I mean, how hard can it be?
August 20th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Um, BA, sir? Your comment about China’s use of the Olympics reminds you of 1938. Would you be referring to the Berlin Olympics of 1936?
August 20th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Yeah, I meant 1936.
Fixed, thanks.
August 20th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Hm. Sure, it sounds crazy, but how else could you explain Michael Phelps’s stellar performance?
August 20th, 2008 at 11:01 am
falacious use of math = fallacious use of English
August 20th, 2008 at 11:09 am
I am a long time avid Olympic fan who was (and is) disgusted that China has been awarded these games with their appalling human rights record (it IS a pre condition of winning the bid) Having said all that TEAM GB ARE THIRD IN THE MEDALS TABLE! Not bad for a wee small country and IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ASTROLOGY!
August 20th, 2008 at 11:12 am
“I am not really a big Olympics fan. I used to be, but then they started letting pro athletes play, and the “pageantry” became ridiculous…”
Well the “amateur” Olympic ideal actually kept working class folks from competing – cuz they couldn’t afford to quit their jobs to train, travel or compete. It was a form of class oppression.
The current system with both private and government patronage of athletes, while flawed, is still better than the system we had before. The truly best get more equal opportunity to compete based on ability rather than means.
If athletes are going to continue push back the limits of human achievement they need to devote themselves to it full time while still making a living, which means Olympians have to be “professional” athletes.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:14 am
push = pushing
August 20th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Once upon a time in Greece, the time of the olympic games were a time of peace! Well, we see where we are now….The comparison between 1936 and 2008 is maybe not wrong (not to mention Georgia, where the western world tries to make an aggressor a little bit less aggressive compared to the other one – but that’s another story…). The opening ceremony was faked all the way as we know now and there are many other examples…
@Bruce A:
and you made me laugh indeed!
YOU ARE RIGHT
And now I’m waiting for my pizza and the soccer-game Germany vs Belgium. A pleasant evening everyone!
August 20th, 2008 at 11:17 am
I’m surprised major league baseball or football hasn’t caught on to the use of polynomials. They have every other wierd stat. Maybe some enterprising sports agent wil figure a way (to make money) and then everybody will know more about polynomials!
August 20th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Phil,
Not to quibble but politics and nationalism have been a part of the Olympic games since their inception.
* Sotades at the ninety-ninth Festival was victorious in the long race and proclaimed a Cretan, as in fact he was. But at the next Festival he made himself an Ephesian, being bribed to do so by the Ephesian people. For this act he was banished by the Cretans. (Pausanias, Description of Greece , 6.18.6)
*Olympia was also a place for announcing political alliances. Thucydides describes a 100-year military treaty the Athenians, Argives, Mantineans, and Eleans entered into, which was recorded in public inscriptions on stone pillars at the first three cities, and on a bronze pillar at Olympia.
* The first post-war Games were held in 1948 in London, with both Germany and Japan excluded. (wikipedia)
* The 1972 Olympic games in Munich probably brought terrorism into the consciousness of the world at large.
and so forth and so on. It is as it ever has been.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:49 am
I am sorry that I have to disagree with your first paragraph. I could not understand “what” could not sink much lower. There have been more egregious examples in the past.
In the recent years which nation has not hosted (summer) olympics as political tool? 1980-Moscow. USA boycotted the games, while our biggest ally in Europe GBR attended the same. 1984-LA. USSR boycotted the games. If politics did not play a role, why would these so called world’s superpowers did not display sportsmanship (sportspersonship?)?
The way I look at China hosting 2008 summer olympics, I am thrilled to see an Asian (developing) country hosting the games and that too, doing an awesome job at it. The venues are top notch. Opening ceremoney was fabulous. At least they have tried their best to make 2008 summer olympics memorable and less stressful for all participants.
Read up on how Atlanta handled the 1996 games and the controversy surrounding it.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:50 am
madge Says:
TEAM GB ARE THIRD IN THE MEDALS TABLE! Not bad for a wee small country and IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ASTROLOGY!
Yer just sayin’ that because you are a Gemini!
August 20th, 2008 at 11:58 am
DrFlimmer wrote: “…The opening ceremony was faked all the way as we know now and there are many other examples…”
It was NOT faked *all the way*. Only the fireworks were a bit computer-enhanced. Moreover, there was no discernible difference between what a spectator in the stadium saw and what a TV viewer across the world saw. Please read up the paragraph on opening ceremoney for 2008 summer olympic games in Wikipedia for more info.
And… what many other examples do you have?
SRM.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:58 am
@PG – Good saying I’ve heard that also.
There is a counter example that always bothered me: mens clothes have two measurements, ladies dress sizes have one. That never made sense to me.
Bewildered in Canada.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Jeez, why didn’t he mention that he could get an even better fit with a 4th or 5th-order polynomial? Now that would be really impressive as the regression curve exactly threads through each point on the graph. It’s an amazing thing to see.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
I had to laugh about all the “Lucky 8″ stuff for China the media was going ga-ga over. NBC interviewed some Chinese numerology expert, and when NBC pointed out that bad things have happened on “8″ days, this expert says, “Well, sometimes good things happen, and sometimes bad things happen.” Yeah, so maybe that means it’s, uh, MEANINGLESS!?!?
August 20th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Phil,
I think your discussion on polynomial fitting and free parameters needs to be cleaned up a bit. A degree three polynomial may over-fit the data, but it might not. It all depends on how much data you have and how complicated the underlying function is. Vapnick shows the statistical bounds on expected risk and how this relates to dimension. The key point is that any model, no matter what field, is worthless until its performance is measured on unseen data. One of the things that irks me is other fields (I am in machine learning) not presenting how a model does on unseen data. For example, a climate model fit to data up to now and then saying, “In 2050…” is worthless until 2050. The model may be valid, but we have little way of knowing. I’m not picking on global warming, but I’ve noticed that they seem to be sloppy on this (or at least, the scientific reporting seems to be sloppy). There is a lot more I could say on this, but since this is a comment, I’ll just highlight this key point.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
At Mitchell’s website, he has a graph of (apparently) the number of athletes awarded medals in all events except for 5 that are all water-related — meant to serve as a contrast for his claim that Pisces is particularly good at water sports. Notwithstanding the 5 excluded events, the possibility of cherry-picking seemed low for this particular graph, so I pulled the numbers and ran a chi-square test, and I was surprised to get a p-value of 9.28×10-14. With a total of 52 different sports, including the ones that have been discontinued, there are only 2893164 different ways to exclude 5 or fewer events, so I don’t think that cherry-picking alone can explain that result, in any case.
I’m just wondering if anybody here can provide an explanation. One thing I notice is that the four signs that do better than expected are all consecutive, so it probably makes more sense to describe this as seasonal variation that’s totally unrelated to the zodiac.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
You can fit polynomial, but it will be increasingly worse when you predict future with it as you go further.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
I assume that everybody complaining about China being awarded the olympics makes sure to NEVER purchase goods made in China?
August 20th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
The thing is “lucky” 8, only works if you are speaking Cantonese. Which is a very strange thing indeed. In Mandarin 8 doesn’t sound “lucky” at all.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
“There is a counter example that always bothered me: mens clothes have two measurements, ladies dress sizes have one. That never made sense to me.”
Yes, but they have Juniors, Misses and Women’s sizes.
And if the experience of my tagging along with my wife when she is shopping is any indication, none of them ever fit. Ever.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Mitch Miller: “I assume that everybody complaining about China being awarded the olympics makes sure to NEVER purchase goods made in China?”
Well, there may not be much to purchase.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Madge,
Although GB’s success in the games so far makes for a welcome change from the usual failure to live up to over-hyped expectations, I think a lot of people make the ’small country’ mistake for GB. GB’s population is around 60 million, which is larger than the vast majority of competing nations. Add to that the country’s wealth, and third place is the sort of result GB should be getting. If you want good performances for small countries; Jamaica, New Zealand, Slovakia, and Australia are arguably more impressive.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
“Mitch Miller Says:
August 20th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
I assume that everybody complaining about China being awarded the olympics makes sure to NEVER purchase goods made in China?”
That pretty much excludes everything except food.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
[...] BA Blog takes a turn on the topic: Pseudolympics, specifically to call out that ludicrous 3rd-degree-polynomial claim but also to recommend other [...]
August 20th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Well, heck, I would have expected a zeroth-degree polynomial to explain most of the variance between zodiac signs. (That would predict the same number of medals for each sign, for those of you who are still a little bemused by polynomials.) But Phelps has skewed the statistics, so presumably that’s why a higher-degree polynomial is required.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I had to laugh about all the “Lucky 8″ stuff for China the media was going ga-ga over.
Wait. I though 7 was the lucky number? Dang! The science of numerology changes so fast I can’t keep up!
@John Powell
Is there anything that *isn’t* a form of class oppression to you people? So allowing multimillionaire, international superstar Kobe Bryant on the basketball team helps working class people… how exactly?
Oppression generally involves some sort of fundamental rights. I don’t see how “devoting one’s entire life to a sport in order to gain personal glory in the Olympics” is a fundamental right.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
I guess no one in here has pointed out that if you use google earth to look at the Chinese “birds nest” stadium directly from above…
you’ll quickly see that the stadium is the Zodiac…
Therefore you are right, astrology rules the olympics…
And just in case that wasn’t enough for you, check out the logo for the 2010 olympics in Vancouver BC… their mascot is a Sasquatch..
Skeptic wonder twin powers ACTIVATE!
August 20th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Sorry if you aren’t a fan of the Olympics Phil- but I think they are pretty cool! Swimming, track and field, even, wait for it……the crazy Ping Pong.
And way to go Madge with GB’s performance this year. Pretty awesome! More golds than Russia even.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Why is the number of medals awarded to each country being used as an indication of how well it performs?
Take a small country like Nauru with only one participant, they are not going to show up at the top of the list. If the count was done by taking a percentage of the number of each country’s participants, Nauru would either do very well or very bad.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Regarding 8 as a lucky number. A few years back the company I work for issued revision 7 of one of our software packages. This was intended to be the end of the line for that particular package and sales had decided to incorporate the revision number into the the name. The package was internally announced to be released with the name NONAME SEVEN. Immediately there was internal pressure from our Asian branches to skip a revision number and go straight to revision 8 so it could be called NONAME EIGHT.
It was thought it would only confuse our customers if we skipped a revision number, so it was released as: NONAME SEVEN.
A year or so later the software package was still in high demand so a new updated revision was developed and before our Asian branches could even get excited it was released as: NONAME SEVEN 2.0
August 20th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I would say that most of the variance can probably be explained by not normalising the data. What the p value is really telling you is that the chance of spring arriving at around the same time every year is nearly one.
August 20th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I had to laugh about all the “Lucky 8″ stuff for China the media was going ga-ga over.
The BBC were doing this too. Shameful, I thought.
August 20th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
And just to heap Pelion on Ossa, the modern IOC was shaped by that notorious, corrupt fascist Samaranch. Don’t for a minute think that someone, somewhere hasn’t been paid handsomely to cast the ballot for China.
August 20th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
I’m not sure what sort of normalisation you would expect, but I agree with your second statement. What my question really comes down to is, why would athletic prowess correlate with birth season at all?
August 20th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Actually, I’m sure it would, since most people don’t know what a polynomial is, and thus can be bamboozled by such a falacious use of math.
I can’t speak for other states or school districts, but here in the California Sierra Sands School District, algebra is a required high school course.
It’s my guess that more and more people are familiar with the term than in the past.
August 20th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
It is absolutely a shame that we’re going to have to wait until the winter Olympics to hear your astro-luge-y joke. Oh well…the wait will make it funnier!
August 20th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
@Quiet Desperation:
The point is that the best can compete whether they are multimillionaires or NOT.
Perhaps “oppression” is too harsh a word, but certainly the upper class folks who created the modern Olympics in 1896 stacked the deck against working class folks. That system fell apart post WWII when the communist nations fielded “amateur” teams of full time athletes that were professional in all but name.
p.s. If by “you people” you mean “well educated and therefore liberal people” then I gladly accept the label.
;^)
Cheers!
August 20th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
My high school physics teacher kept a scatter plot of garbage against a fifth-order polynomial pinned up amoungst the other randomness on his walls as a lesson about this, and more generally the point that matching a function to your data tells you nothing on its own.
August 20th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Actually, GB is a “small nation” when it comes to Olympic sports. As the British team’s good performance in China shows, it’s mostly down to the amount of money a country is willing to put into these sports that counts, not the size of the population. Because of London 2012, the British government started pumping millions into sports that traditionally get very little support and have no cash flow of their own. The result — more medals.
The US system of pumping billions into college sports ensures that the less popular Olympic sports get a nice chunk of change to keep churning the next generation of stars out (at least in sports like track & field and swimming). No other country has the same resources to compete with that except when centralized systems like the USSR, East Germany, and now China decide that it’s in the nation’s interest to pump millions of dollars into buying sporting success.
With more funding in the next 4 years, the British team will likely peak in 2012 in a moment of undoubted patriotic pride (not really that dissimilar to what the Chinese government is looking for this year) and then they will suffer the same slow decline as Spain and Australia had once the funding disappears and the Olympic stars pass their peak.
August 20th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I’m most concerned that pseudolympics is no longer available over the counter and requires an ID to purchase.
August 20th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Two years ago, the Freakonomics blog discussed a similar claim — that “elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html
August 20th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
The month you were born makes a difference for baseball players who are raised in the US.
http://www.slate.com/id/2188866/pagenum/all/
Of course there’s nothing supernatural about it.
August 20th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Population is an important factor. The bigger the pool, the better chance you have of finding and training top athletes. Of course, a good infrastructure (costs money) is essential, too.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Go Jamaica!!! 3 million people destoying world records.
August 20th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I’m a bit surprised the Chinese regard 08/08/08 as a lucky date, since August and 2008 are aspects of the Western calendar. I did learn a bit about data fitting, good article.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
[...] Pseudolympics – ““Did you know that the distribution of Olympic swimming medallists against the tropical astrological zodiac signs can be almost exactly mapped by a polynomial function of the third degree?” – “Statistician” Kenneth Mitchell [...]
August 20th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
In reading the original press release, I see no reason to dis the Reuters
journalist as he did start his article with the term “fishy”. Can I claim Poe’s law?
Larry
August 20th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
The West Indian nations have done a great job in making use of the American collegiate sports system to groom the raw talents of their top prospects. I can’t keep count of the times the NBC commentators have mentioned with college these athletes represent. Still, the Jamaicans are an awesome team, no doubt about it.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
FWIW, in computer science, we generally write applications that allow artists to create their curves using 3rd degree polynomials (Bezier curves). So you can think of any curve an artist would be likely to draw, and you can fit some sort of 3rd degree polynomial to it!
August 21st, 2008 at 1:29 am
tacitus wrote:
“The West Indian nations have done a great job in making use of the American collegiate sports system to groom the raw talents of their top prospects.”
Surely you meant to write “The American collegiate sports system has made great use of raw West Indian talent to boost the strength of its track and field programs”.
August 21st, 2008 at 2:57 am
One more thing … Usain Bolt went to college in Jamaica, not the USA.
August 21st, 2008 at 5:54 am
@csrster
One of our runners told a CBC reporter that Usain Bolt is “not from this planet, he could do a cartwheel and still beat the rest of the field.”
I will be lucky if I live long enough to see another leap in speed by a human such as happened yesterday. “Experts” always are quick to say the record will never be beaten, we have reached what is humanly possible, and then along comes someone like Bolt and the limits have to be re-defined once again. I wonder what the limit will be?
August 21st, 2008 at 7:25 am
These olympics are just the best olympics I have ever seen. These are excellence itself. Believe what you want about the chinese and their lack of freedom (it’s very sad) but I will certainly not hold back from enjoying these to the end.
Incredible games.
August 21st, 2008 at 7:42 am
By the way, have you heard that the Canadians made a “Lucky Loony”? Yea, you have to find it and then save it to wish our canadian athletes good luck…
Oh hum.
August 21st, 2008 at 8:40 am
@ Michelle
I have to say the Sydney Olympics did it for me as far as presentation and was concerned but I am LOVING these games too. What a pity we in the UK will be hosting them in 2012. Our athletes will do us proud I am sure but I have an awful feeling our organisiation and presentation of the games will be shoddy, tacky, shambolic and cheapskate. I hope I am proved wrong.
August 21st, 2008 at 9:05 am
I just did the cubic fit. It’s horrific. Mitchell’s idea of “almost exactly” is apparently not the same as mine.
And… why would you use a polynomial fit to data that’s periodic (insofar as it’s sequential at all — it’s more catagoric than anything)?
Wow. So much bad math out there.
@CanadianLeigh: if Bolt is not from this planet, how do we determine his star sign? Oh noes!!one!
August 21st, 2008 at 11:44 am
If by “you people” you mean “well educated and therefore liberal people” then I gladly accept the label.
I mean people who adhere to a rigid ideology (left, right or whatever) and see the bogeymen of the other side (ie everyone else) in every shadow, but you backed off on the oppression rhetoric, so never mind.
There is no modern ideology that has has a majority lock on the truth or intelligence. This is a big problem because too many continuously quaff their selected ideological poison.
Saying “liberal = smart” is just about as meaningful to me as someone saying “Evangelical = more moral”. It’s also a fallacious way of shutting down debate. The problem with conservatism in this country right now is its infection by religion. Barry Goldwater, a classical conservative (which was much was closer to libertarianism), warned against this very thing decades ago. My hate for the GOP probably transcends that of most “liberals” because they have completely polluted the debate about the balance between the public and the private sectors. Conservatism has forever been shackled to religious idiocy by these pious a**clowns.
But overall I’ve seen too many liberals and conservatives (and all the other ideologues) who espouse the same “solutions” over and over despite there being a lot (in some cases *centuries*) of evidence that it DOES NOT WORK. The fact that a large number of my fellow skeptics cannot apply their skepticism to their [golem voice]precious[/golem voice] political ideologies concerns me a great deal.
August 21st, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Going back to the maths for a bit…
Phil, your comment about the third-order polynomial reminds me of something I learned as an undergrad – that, if you want to make a straight-line graph, just use logarithmic scales for both axes. A log-log plot is almost always a straight line, and almost never proves anything (e.g. take a log-log plot of, say, the GDP of Sweden versus world pole-vaulting records – it will be, near as makes no difference, a straight line).
August 25th, 2008 at 9:29 am
[...] (Hat tip: MarkCC; see also The Bad Astronomer) [...]
August 31st, 2008 at 6:18 am
I do not believe this