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army1987 comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Correlation doesn't imply causation.
Correlation is significant evidence for causation.
It simply doesn't prove causation.
Yeah, but it's as strong evidence for A causing B as for B causing A.
And that's if you didn't forget C through Z which all also correlate with B to varying degrees, or A_a through A_z which all fall under A and better explain B than simply A. Or maybe it was a combination of A, D, F, G, and Z that caused B. And so on and so on. The difficulty of finding causation scales with the complexity of the system directly encompassing the cause, and that makes finding significant evidence for causation from correlations like those mentioned by ArisKatsaris very hard.
On a practical level, we have to use something to evaluate the worth of political and social beliefs/movements/structures, and pure logic alone doesn't seem to work out okay regarding this.
Seeing whether they correlate in practice with healthy and prosperous populations seems a much better method of judgment.
Okay, let me be more explicit: how do you know that feminism leads to higher standards of living rather than the other way round?
I actually think that both contribute to each other.
Macroeconomics?
Alas, "imply" is used to mean both things.