With regards to investigating how people become rich, if you want results that are meaningful and useful, I think you would want to examine, not just what rich people did which resulted in them becoming rich, but what people in the general population are doing, and whether people doing those things in general tend to become rich. If doing the same things doesn’t tend to lead to the same results, you can look to see if there are other factors that reliably occur in conjunction with people becoming rich. You need to go this far to be able to predict, not just what a person should do if they intend to become rich, but under what circumstances you should expect someone to become rich. At this point though, you’re probably going to have to expend more than spare time and pocket money to get your answers.
Great point. In the author’s description he only discussed how to establish a correlation. However it’s important to point out that in those types of studies you are not manipulating any variables in the equation which means it’s very difficult to tease apart the different interactions in the system. If you really wanted to do DIY science you would need to change something and determine whether there was a change in the outcome with appropriate controls to make sure that your changes only produced an effect in the variable you wanted. This is the really fun part of science!!
With regards to investigating how people become rich, if you want results that are meaningful and useful, I think you would want to examine, not just what rich people did which resulted in them becoming rich, but what people in the general population are doing, and whether people doing those things in general tend to become rich. If doing the same things doesn’t tend to lead to the same results, you can look to see if there are other factors that reliably occur in conjunction with people becoming rich. You need to go this far to be able to predict, not just what a person should do if they intend to become rich, but under what circumstances you should expect someone to become rich. At this point though, you’re probably going to have to expend more than spare time and pocket money to get your answers.
Great point. In the author’s description he only discussed how to establish a correlation. However it’s important to point out that in those types of studies you are not manipulating any variables in the equation which means it’s very difficult to tease apart the different interactions in the system. If you really wanted to do DIY science you would need to change something and determine whether there was a change in the outcome with appropriate controls to make sure that your changes only produced an effect in the variable you wanted. This is the really fun part of science!!