I first became aware of the Human PIN Code late in 2002, when a friend of mine enthused about this new system to achieve deep insights into your own personality and that of others, using nothing more than their date of birth. A rather startling claim, but if there is anything to it, it would constitute a huge scientific breakthrough, so I decided to investigate the issue. In this article, I shall share some of the things I found out.

What is the Human PIN Code about?

The Human PIN Code was invented by Dr Douglas Forbes, and he claims that it is a highly accurate system that can, using only a person's date of birth, predict in detail all manner of aspects of the person's personality. The basics of the system are described in a book titled 'The Human PIN Code,' which Dr Forbes wrote with Richard Higgins. Dr Forbes and some of his associates also present workshops on the PIN Code, details of which can be obtained from his website, http://www.humanpincode.com/.

The more I learned about the system, the more dubious the Human PIN Code appeared to me. I have entered into correspondence with Dr Forbes and some of the people in his circle; the complete correspondence and some of my comments on it can be read here. Since the correspondence will speak for itself, I shall try to keep this article brief, and simply summarise some of my objections to Dr Forbes' system.

The system's theoretical base is dubious.

The Human PIN Code is not really anything more than numerology. Just as in the case of numerology, it uses a person's date of birth to generate, by simple arithmetic, a set of numbers. These numbers supposedly give us information about the person. As I explain in my correspondence with Mr Higgins, this is an extremely dubious procedure, because our calendar system is entirely arbitrary, and has no inherent 'deeper meaning.' There are many other calendar systems, and in each of them you would have a different birthday. One might as well choose an entirely random birthday and generate a set of numbers from it.

On his website, Dr Forbes claims to have "uncovered Pythagoras' Octagon Theorem and has thereby found the key to defining the entire experience of creation." Apart from the fact that it is difficult to imagine how a theorem of geometry could have anything to do with human psychology, I have been unable to find any reference to such a theorem anywhere, and have received no reply to my inquiry to Dr Forbes about it. This raises even more grave doubts in my mind about the theoretical underpinnings of the Human PIN Code.

The system does not work.

Even if the theoretical basis of a system seems dubious, it would not matter so much if the system actually worked. But the Human PIN Code does not appear to me to work any better than a more or less randomly generated analysis. A PIN Code analysis basically consists of a large scattershot of vague claims, so that at least some of them will appear to be accurate for just about any person. What is especially damning, is that in typical analyses, there are often large numbers of mutually exclusive claims, along the lines of 'You tend to be aggressive towards those who disagree with you' and 'You are very patient and will try to avoid conflict.' This problem will become clear to anyone who carefully reads through my correspondence with Mr Higgins.

The Human PIN Code is claimed to be 90% to 95% accurate, but I have seen no attempt anywhere to justify those numbers with actual statistical analyses.

The system is occult.

As can be seen from my correspondence with Dr Forbes and his followers, it is just about impossible to get hold of any information about the inner workings of the Human PIN Code. These folks will simply not tell you anything more than 'Attend our workshops, and all will be revealed.' Needless to say, these workshops are expensive, and before attending, you have to sign a confidentiality agreement. This means that in practice, Human PIN Code practitioners form a secret little clique, carefully preventing the light of reason to tarnish their hallowed system. Such secrecy is the very antithesis of science. In real science, findings are peer-reviewed, published, debated, experimented with and only after a very thorough investigative process do new ideas see the insides of textbooks.

Not so with Dr Forbes' system. As far as I can work out, none of his ideas have been published in any peer-reviewed journals, and you are effectively prevented from investigating any of it. You basically have to take his word for it; even Mr Higgins, who co-authored 'The Human PIN Code,' confesses to not having a clue about the inner workings of the system.

The system's creator is unqualified.

I was reluctant to add this last point to this article, because I do not want to engage in personal attacks, and in the end, the system itself is what matters, not its creator. Nevertheless, in my investigation of Dr Forbes himself, several things came to light that I feel should be mentioned here.

On the jacket of his book, and on his website, it is claimed that Douglas Forbes holds a Ph.D. from the University of Metaphysics. On Mr Higgins' website (http://www.chinoukwolf.co.za/) it is claimed that Forbes is a 'scientist and physicist.' I have been unable to verify any of these claims, and the bits that I did manage to find out, in my opinion cast grave doubts over Dr Forbes' qualifications.

I requested the University of Metaphysics to inform me of such things as when Dr Forbes studied there, and what the title of his Ph.D. thesis is. They declined to give me any information about him without his written permission. I have decided to take his word for it; I have no particular reason to doubt his claim that he was awarded a Ph.D. by UM. However, a quick surf around their website will quickly bring to light that their degrees are of rather dubious value.

According to their website, one only needs to have completed high school in order to enroll in their Ph.D. program. Compare this to mainstream universities, which require four to six years of tertiary study before a Ph.D. program can be begun. Furthermore, they advise students that during the year that the Ph.D. will take to complete, students will need to study about two to three hours per week.

Let us put that in some perspective. My own alma mater, the University of South Africa, presents courses in the form of units called modules, and for a bachelor's degree usually requires students to complete thirty such modules. In their yearbook, they advise students that one module will require about eight hours of study per week, for the duration of the year that it takes to complete a module. From this it is clear that to complete a humble B. Sc. degree through Unisa, you have to put in about a hundred (yes, a hundred!) times as much study as was required of Dr Forbes for his much-vaunted Ph.D. And if you wished to complete a Ph.D. through Unisa, you would have to put in more than that amount of study before you will be ready to even register for the Ph.D. I wonder what kind if things they teach in the UM's Ph.D. program, but suffice it to say that Dr Forbes' degree will not be recognized by any university or technikon in South Africa, and I find it just a little bit disingenuous of him to write 'Ph.D.' behind his name.

As for the claim that he is a scientist, I have yet to see a single scientific article of any kind by him, published in any peer-reviewed scientific journal of note. In my correspondence with him, I have requested him to provide me with citations to any such articles, which up to now he has failed to do.

Summary

I have reason to believe that Dr Forbes is selling snake oil to an unsuspecting public. I am willing to accept that he himself really does believe that his system works; I certainly do not wish to suggest that he is a deliberate fraud. But the fact remains that his system has no solid theoretical base, does not really work in practice (at least not for anyone but the most gullible), and the PIN code practitioners are apparently not really willing to subject their system to any kind of skeptical investigation. As such, whatever merits the Human PIN Code might have, it should be clear that it is not science.

Caveat emptor!