You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

sixes_and_sevens comments on Taking "correlation does not imply causation" back from the internet - Less Wrong Discussion

41 Post author: sixes_and_sevens 03 October 2012 12:18PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (70)

Comments (70)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 03 October 2012 06:52:26PM 9 points [-]

I go to some lengths to avoid innumerate discussion online, but it still happens in real life with reasonable frequency. The flavours I seem to encounter most:

1) an all-purpose attempt to refute any statistical finding, even if said finding is not showing correlation, or proposing causation

2) dogged adherence to the belief that the direction of causal relationships are completely impossible to establish

3) the most perverse, that establishing an association between two variables is evidence against a causal relationship

Comment author: Morendil 04 October 2012 02:53:58PM 4 points [-]

Great answer, thanks. At the same time, I am reminded of gwern's recent admonitions against "letting the better be the enemy of the good":

  • I'm all in favor of giving the "correlation does not imply causation" meme better and more effective Internet visibility, perhaps with a friendly illustrated guide: "A simple explanation of association and causation".
  • I'd be dead set against snarky content that runs even the slightest risk of making people feel dumb for knowing something that useful.
Comment author: AlexSchell 03 October 2012 08:19:12PM *  2 points [-]

Your post is valuable enough that it's worth it to edit it to avoid misinterpretations of your point (like IlyaShpitser's in reply to Morendil above).

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit