Jack comments on Causality does not imply correlation - Less Wrong

13 Post author: RichardKennaway 08 July 2009 12:52AM

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Comment author: mistercow 08 July 2009 03:39:22AM 5 points [-]

That is what A and B are: a randomly wandering variable A and its rate of change B.

Maybe I'm not quite understanding, but it seems to me that your argument relies on a rather broad definition of "causality". B may be dependent on A, but to say that A "causes" B seems to ignore some important connotations of the concept.

I think what bugs me about it is that "causality" implies a directness of the dependency between the two events. At first glance, this example seems like a direct relationship. But I would argue that B is not caused by A alone, but by both A's current and previous states. If you were to transform A so that a given B depended directly on a given A', I think you would indeed see a correlation.

I realize that I'm kind of arguing in a circle here; what I'm ultimately saying is that the term "cause" ought to imply correlation, because that is more useful to us than a synonym for "determine", and because that is more in line (to my mind, at least) with the generally accepted connotations of the word.

Comment author: Jack 08 July 2009 04:10:25AM 1 point [-]

I don't think you are arguing in a circle. B is caused by current and previous As. Obviously we're not going to see a correlation unless we control for the previous state of A. Properly controlled the relationship between the two variables will be one-to-one, won't it?