What's wrong with Numerology

What’s wrong with Numerology

Numerology is a strange thing you may encounter at some point in your life. While you can believe into anything, it’s of course important to not take it too serious as some people do. You should be able to detect if something completely random is trying to mimic the science.

Background

Lately I’ve been on the party where I met a girl who was making money by doing numerologic predictions for people. I’ve never had a chance to have a conversation with such people, and I was very excited when I finally got it. One of the first questions I asked was a sanity check: “you know that you are tricking people, right?”

She seemed pretty intelligent to me and I thought that it’s just a way to make money for her - it’s of course bad to trick people into such things, but well, we are not judging here.

Surprisingly, she turned out to be strong believer and she really thought that she’s making world a better place by doing this. I thought, well, maybe she’s right, let’s find out! We had a long conversation, let’s jump straight into key points. I will express some parts of our dialogue as shortened Q&A’s.

Do numbers matter?

Basically as she explained, they convert everything into numbers in numerology (pretty much like we do in programming). I have no problem with, for example, converting my name into some number and than working with it. So, according to this theory, numbers have special meaning.

Is it the number that matters, or the digits it consists of?
The number itself

This absolutely makes sense - since we can have an infinite amount of numeral systems. E.g 11 is eleven in base 10, but at the same time these digits can express number three in binary (base 2).

So, ultimately this theory must be a subset of determinism - numbers affect our life in a specific way - they produce more numbers and the cycle continues. She agreed with that, and since there’s no way to prove this deterministic aspect - I’m ok with that. If we know we can’t prove it - you can only believe it (or not). Who knows, maybe numbers really have special meaning. But the problem isn’t here…

Which numbers matter?

Everything above is perfectly valid, but the question naturally arises:

How do we choose, which numbers matter?
There are special numbers in your life! E.g your name/surname/etc, your birthday, your [try not to laugh] passport number! The time of specific events also matters.

As soon as I heard that, I was 100% sure it’s a total bullshit, but how do I prove it? I’ve started with simple things.

What if I change my name?
Your destiny changes along with it!
Ok, what if I don’t have a name? What if I live in the woods and don’t know what the passport is?
In this case only date of your birth matters!

Ok, first of all, she seems to not understand that passport is a thing that only exists in a specific context: civilized society, jurisdiction, ability to print - just to name a few.

There were no passports back then, did people not have destiny?
But they had names!
Well, let’s go back to cavemen - they didn’t have names. So… Numerology didn’t work in those times, did it?
It does not matter! If no one could speak or even had a name - they didn’t care about numerology so it could not work. But it works now! Or there was a different Numerology…

This last argument is pretty interesting. The problem is - well, if your science (or any set of laws) works - it works every time. If you have Numerology v1 for ancient people and Numerology v2 for a modern society - it’s not a one science - it’s two!

A “proof”

Here’s somewhat formal proof that such form of Numerology can’t exist:

We’ll define Numerology as a mapping which maps the space of numbers in your life into the space of possible outcomes
Assume there only exists one valid Numerology. If there are more valid “Numerologies” - it means we can choose any of those as we need and make up any result.
Assume we can only account for finite amount of numbers in our life. If it’s not true, such Numerology is useless - we can’t make any predictions if the amount of factors is infinite!
Consider some point in one’s life. It can be described with the finite amount of N numbers - e.g current time, current passport name, amount of money in bank account, etc.
Let’s go back in time to the point where this person had no bank account - it means now there are only N-1 meaningful factors
Go back further to the point where the person didn’t have a passport (maybe he was just born). It’s N-2 now
We can keep decreasing N as much as we want, all the way to 0. Even the most “abstract” concepts, such as time, were invented by humans and we can go back where they didn’t know how to measure time, it means there were no origin (or no one has defined it). As a number, time only exists as an interval - from START to END. If there’s no single START - we can take any point and choose arbitrary number! One can argue that we can take BIG BANG as a START. But well, in this case, what unit do we use to measure time? Do we use seconds, minutes or what?
We have now N different valid versions of Numerology! It contradicts with our assumption that there’s only one valid Numerology.

The “proof” above is of course not 100% correctly formulated, but hopefully you get the idea and reasoning behind it. The better and shorter version might be:

For any given outcome S for the person P, there exists a “version” of Numerology V that picks a finite amount of specific factors for that person, such that V(P) = S

It basically means that since we have infinitely many factors to measure in our life (and we can make up infinitely many measuring units) - we can generate any sequence of numbers to make up specific result. Of course, we can not make any predictions based on that - this is a complete bullshit. This is also backed up by the fact that there’s no single “repository” or “sourse of truth” for Numerology. Everyone just comes up with their own version! Even if there is some hidden secret knowledge base it’s also totally made up and as invalid as any other.

Why she thinks she’s right

How do you know which parameters to account?
It’s statistics and high-level maths! [Here she started explaining me how they accumulated huge amount of data and analyzed that etc. etc.]

Yes, she may understands the math that transforms the numbers into results. The problem is - math is only doing the mapping! If the source of mapping is incorrect, the result can’t be correct too! Information follows this path:

Reality
Numerology picks [arbitrary] N factors
Super-advanced math functions
Resulting prediction

She knows that step 3 and 4 work, but what she doesn’t understand is that step 2 can give arbitrary results! Therefore steps 3 and 4 do not matter as they act on the results of step 2. This is exactly what misleads people and makes them trust the system! They are so focused on verifying steps 3 and 4, they completely forget about step 2!

Few words about statistics

They may gather as much data as they want. There’s such thing as the Law of large numbers. It’s usually enough to debunk any sort of fraudelent predictors - and this is not the exception.

PS

These guys always sound so convincing because usually they believe the theory themselves. Always make sure to perform a “sanity check” on such things. Some of them require deeper thoughts, but usually you can “smell” the trickstery (or foolishness) right away. A common sense is all that you need in order to avoid getting tricked by them.

Fun fact: almost all numbers are normal yet uncomputable - in practice it means we can’t even write them down! If you, for example, measure something (except for counting instances of objects) in real world with a fixed unit of measurement - it’s almost never going to be rational number. Do you think every single one of those uncountably infinitely many numbers has its own “special meaning”? See this video for detailed explanation. There are of course more inconsistencies to it that I missed.