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
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.
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
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.
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).