Rationality Quotes February 2013

arundelo

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Yes, this is completely wrong. There is frequently no correlation but strong causation due to effect cancellation (homeostasis, etc.)

Here's a recent paper making this point in the context of mediation analysis in social science (I could post many more):

http://www.quantpsy.org/pubs/rucker_preacher_tormala_petty_2011.pdf

Nancy, I don't mean to jump on you specifically here, but this does seem to me to be a special instance of a general online forum disease, where people {prefer to use | view as authoritative} online sources of information (blogs, wikipedia, even tvtropes, etc.) vs mainstream sources (books, academic papers, professionals). Vinge calls it "the net of a million lies" for a reason!

I didn't feel jumped on, though I still don't have a feeling for how common causation without corelation is.