Mark_Friedenbach comments on Confound it! Correlation is (usually) not causation! But why not? - Less Wrong

44 Post author: gwern 09 July 2014 03:04AM

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Comment author: gwern 10 July 2014 09:14:47PM *  4 points [-]

Yes. Even more generally... might be an over-application of Occam's razor: insisting everything be maximally simple? It's maximally simple when A and B correlate to infer that one of them causes the other (instead of postulating a C common cause); it's maximally simple to explain inexplicable events as due to a supernatural agent (instead of postulating a universe of complex underlying processes whose full explication fills up libraries without end and are still poorly understood).

Comment author: [deleted] 11 July 2014 03:45:13PM 3 points [-]

That sounds more like a poor understanding of Occam's razor. Complex ontologically basic processes is not simpler than a handful of strict mathematical rules.

Comment author: gwern 11 July 2014 05:38:17PM *  4 points [-]

Of course it's (normatively) wrong. But if that particular error is what's going on in peoples' heads, it'll manifest as a different pattern of errors (and hence useful interventions) than an availability bias: availability bias will be cured by forcing generation of scenarios, but a preference for oversimplification will cause the error even if you lay out the various scenarios on a silver platter, because the subject will still prefer the maximally simple version where A->B rather than A<-C->B.