The point is that you "assume" that the universe is the same everywhere based on local observations. However, you have MADE the observations and you don’t go around saying that since you only made a limited amount of observations, the generalization is unreasonable.

Lets try and separate our(my?) natural antagonism towards pseudo science, junk science and the occult, and the specific point here. There was a statement that the existence of an effect that is extremely unlikely (if we assume the null hypothesis that dates of birth are uncorrelated with “equilibrium” and that “equilibrium” is uncorrelated with being an NBA MVP). The pseudo science victim (psv) says that this is not an indication of anything because even one counter example can falsify it. I disagree, because until that counterexample appears ( swiftly and in our days, amen), this is what I expect of a science: shows connections that are much beyond chance, and can be refuted based on new evidence. There are other demands, but I think that on the face of it, if someone had a formula for predicting presumed random events, with this kind of track record, and I had no external reason to be suspicious, I’d say he’s on to something.

Psv seems to say that the possibility of counterexample rules out the “data” as proof of anything. But on the other hand, if there was no *possibility* of counter example, then we’d have a tautology ( which is indeed a “proof” in the mathematical sense so that semantically he is correct), which is not really what we think of when we say “proved scientifically”.