= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RichardKennaway comments on Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (302)
"Measuring a bunch of factors etc." is an observational investigation; "being married influences lifespan" is a causal statement. The former absolutely does not mean the latter, although given additional causal information or assumptions you may be able to deduce it from the experiment. Merely controlling for common factors does not fix this.
I didn't want to imply that there's a causal link. Do you have suggestions for another verb to replace "influence" in that sentence?
"Is positively associated with." "Tend to be found together with." "Correlates with."
Have statisticians who do not understand causation and philosophers who do not believe in it corrupted the language so much as to make "influence", a purely causal concept in everyday language, be a synonym of "association"?
To me those options don't feel like they are everyday language.
They do mean the right thing, though. And "tend to be found together with"? Everyday words, all of them, put together in an everyday way. Perhaps it is the concept that is not an everyday one. It needs to be.