Ben Goldacre
Saturday September 2, 2006
The Guardian

I see an angry balding premium-rate phoneline multi-millionaire… Of course, Daily Mail astrologer Jonathan Cainer will already have predicted that I was going to write about him here today, so as you read this, I will be chewing my muesli and reading a simultaneous rebuttal to my comments in his own column. Spooky.

The simplest test of any prediction, you might think, is to look back at whether it came true or not, as long as the prediction was precise enough. Phoneline mogul Cainer’s last major coup came at the very end of last year. The Mail crowed triumphantly when Darren Nash, who is a “Libra”, won the £15m Christmas Eve lottery jackpot, because Cainer had written to Librans (get ready for this, because it will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck): “You may like to know that Venus, your ruler turns around this week – as will your fortunes.” No shut up. Stuff like that really scares me.

Usually, of course, the prediction is to vague to assess in retrospect. Cainer – who describes himself as an “unreconstructed hippy”, writes for the Daily Mail, and has taken in millions of pounds on expensive premium rate phone lines which some might consider exploitative – bucked that trend in his column last week: “As I predicted on BBC2 a few weeks ago, scientists have accepted as a planet the new discovery 2003 UB313… They have also reclassified Ceres, the asteroid, as a planet – and declared that Pluto’s Moon Charon, is a planet too.”

Which would all be very impressive except, in fact, the International Astronomical Union decided at the last minute not to designate Ceres, Charon, or 2003 UB313 as planets. So not only was Cainer’s original prediction wrong, his magazine column celebrating the accuracy of his prediction was wrong too (it turns out this was written and printed over-confidently before the final decision was made).

Cainer seems to have a difficult relationship with science. In the past he has written: “Some scientists claim to have a truly open mind. The sorry truth though, is that most scientists hate astrology with a vengeance. Academics who ever dare to remotely suggest a finding in favour of astrology have their work torn to shreds, their lectures met with howls of derision and their grants mysteriously ‘cut off’’”

Now personally, I can think of few things more exciting and interesting than discovering that Cainer could, for example – and I realise this is beginning to seem less and less likely – genuinely predict my future, even if it did cost me 60p a minute. I would be blown away, and love every minute. In fact, research has suggested that scientists in general welcome surprising results.

Polish researcher Michael Jasienski reported in the journal Nature recently how he searched for words indicating surprise in 30 million abstracts of English-language scientific papers from the Science Citation Index; he then compared them with 8 million academic articles from the Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities citation indices, and with some samples of standard English.

The word ‘surprising’ appeared 12 times more frequently in the natural sciences than in standard English, and 1.3 times more frequently than in social sciences, arts and humanities research; and the word ‘unexpected’ appears 39 times and 2.2 times more frequently in the natural sciences than, respectively, in standard English and in non-science academic writing. Obviously humanities graduates don’t find their “discoveries” as surprising as scientists do. It must be a dreary life.

But in the meantime, if surprises make you nervous, and you want the inside track before they sneak up on you, then Cainer has just the thing to calm your fears: “I have just recorded your latest in depth week ahead prediction. I really think you need to hear it! Call 0906…”

Please send in your bad science to bad.science@guardian.co.uk

Incidentally.

I have no idea what Cainer’s star sign is but I went to this page on his site,

pisces.bubble.com/webstars/friend/friendForm.cfm

typed his name and “sagittarius” in, and this is what I got back:

jonathan cainer
A very special Sagittarian