Read the below passage and answer the questions that follow. Most of us think astrology was a fanciful misconception about the world that flourished in times of widespread superstition and ignorance, and did not, could not, survive advances in mathematics and science. Alexander Boxer is out to show how wrong that picture is, and (his book) A Scheme of Heaven will make you fall in love with astrology, even as it extinguishes any niggling suspicion that it might actually work. Boxer, a physicist and historian, kindles our admiration for the earliest astronomers. My favourite among his many jaw-dropping stories is the discovery of the preces sion of the equinoxes. This is the process by which the sun, each mid-spring and mid-autumn, rises at a fractionally different spot in the sky every year. It takes 26,000 years to make a full revolution of the zodiac-a tiny motion first detected by Hipparchus around 130 BC. And of course, Hipparchus, to make this observation at all, ’had to rely on the accuracy of star-gazers who would have seemed ancient even to him.... Boxer goes much further, dubbing it ’the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem’. For as long as lives depend on the growth cycles of plants, the stars will, in a very general sense, dictate the destiny of our species. How far can we push this idea before it tips into absurdity? The answer is not immediately obvious, since pretty much any scheme we dream up will fit some conjunction or arrangement of the skies. As civilisations become richer and more various, the number and variety of historical events increases, as does the chance that some event will coincide with some planetary conjunction. Around the year 1400, the French Catholic cardinal Pierre d’Ailly concluded his astrological history of the world with a warning that the Antichrist could be expected to arrive in the year 1789, which of course turned out to be the year of the French Revolution. But with every spooky correlation comes an even larger horde of absurdities and fatuities. Today, using a machine-learning algorithm, Boxer shows that ’it’s possi ble to devise a model that perfectly mimics Bitcoin’s price history and that takes, as its input data, nothing more than the zodiac signs of the planets on any given day’. ... Boxer writes: ”Today there’s no need to root and rummage for incidental correlations. Modern machine-learning algorithms are correlation monsters. They can make pretty much any signal correlate with any other.” We are bewitched by big data, and imagine it is something new. We are ever indulgent towards economists who cannot even spot a global crash. We docilely conform to every algorithmically justified norm. Are we as credulous, then, as those who once took astrological advice as seriously as a medical diagnosis? Oh, for sure. At least our forebears could say they were having to feel their way in the dark. The statistical tools you need to sort real correlations from pretty patterns weren’t developed until the late 19th century. What’s our excuse? According to Boxer: ”Those of us who are enthusiastic about the promise of numerical data to unlock the secrets of ourselves and our world would do well simply to acknowledge that others have come this way before.”

Question

Read the below passage and answer the questions that follow. Most of us think astrology was a fanciful misconception about the world that flourished in times of widespread superstition and ignorance, and did not, could not, survive advances in mathematics and science. Alexander Boxer is out to show how wrong that picture is, and (his book) A Scheme of Heaven will make you fall in love with astrology, even as it extinguishes any niggling suspicion that it might actually work.  Boxer, a physicist and historian, kindles our admiration for the earliest astronomers. My favourite among his many jaw-dropping stories is the discovery of the preces sion of the equinoxes. This is the process by which the sun, each mid-spring and mid-autumn, rises at a fractionally different spot in the sky every year. It takes 26,000 years to make a full revolution of the zodiac-a tiny motion first detected by Hipparchus around 130 BC. And of course, Hipparchus, to make this observation at all, ’had to rely on the accuracy of star-gazers who would have seemed ancient even to him.... Boxer goes much further, dubbing it ’the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem’.  For as long as lives depend on the growth cycles of plants, the stars will, in a very general sense, dictate the destiny of our species. How far can we push this idea before it tips into absurdity? The answer is not immediately obvious, since pretty much any scheme we dream up will fit some conjunction or arrangement of the skies. As civilisations become richer and more various, the number and variety of historical events increases, as does the chance that some event will coincide with some planetary conjunction. Around the year 1400, the French Catholic cardinal Pierre d’Ailly concluded his astrological history of the world with a warning that the Antichrist could be expected to arrive in the year 1789, which of course turned out to be the year of the French Revolution.  But with every spooky correlation comes an even larger horde of absurdities and fatuities. Today, using a machine-learning algorithm, Boxer shows that ’it’s possi ble to devise a model that perfectly mimics Bitcoin’s price history and that takes, as its input data, nothing more than the zodiac signs of the planets on any given day’. ... Boxer writes: ”Today there’s no need to root and rummage for incidental correlations. Modern machine-learning algorithms are correlation monsters. They can make pretty much any signal correlate with any other.”  We are bewitched by big data, and imagine it is something new. We are ever indulgent towards economists who cannot even spot a global crash. We docilely conform to every algorithmically justified norm. Are we as credulous, then, as those who once took astrological advice as seriously as a medical diagnosis? Oh, for sure. At least our forebears could say they were having to feel their way in the dark. The statistical tools you need to sort real correlations from pretty patterns weren’t developed until the late 19th century. What’s our excuse? According to Boxer: ”Those of us who are enthusiastic about the promise of numerical data to unlock the secrets of ourselves and our world would do well simply to acknowledge that others have come this way before.”

cdquestions Admin · Accepted Answer

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The overall message of the passage can best be summed up as:

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The Correct Option is C

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"...with every spooky correlation comes an even larger horde of absurdities and fatuities." This line is illustrated by the description of:

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The Correct Option is A

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The example of the Bitcoin (paragraph 4) is used to illustrate which of the following?

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The Correct Option is C

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The author’s attitude towards the accuracy of modern economic forecasting is one of:

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The Correct Option is A

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The author uses the phrase "feel their way in the dark" (last paragraph) to show that:

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The Correct Option is B

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