To chime in as well: my own understanding of ‘correlation does not imply causation’ does not come from the basic statistics courses and articles and tutorials I read. While I knew the saying and the concepts and a little bit about causal graphs, it took years of failed self-experiments and the intensely frustrating experience of seeing correlate after correlate fail randomized experiments before I truly accepted it.
I don’t know how helpful, exactly, this has been on a practical level, but at least it’s good for me on an epistemic level in that I have since accepted many fewer new beliefs than I would otherwise have.
Although you know, there is no reason in principle you couldn’t get all that stuff Anders_H is talking about from intro stats, it’s just that stats isn’t taught as well as it can be.
To chime in as well: my own understanding of ‘correlation does not imply causation’ does not come from the basic statistics courses and articles and tutorials I read. While I knew the saying and the concepts and a little bit about causal graphs, it took years of failed self-experiments and the intensely frustrating experience of seeing correlate after correlate fail randomized experiments before I truly accepted it.
I don’t know how helpful, exactly, this has been on a practical level, but at least it’s good for me on an epistemic level in that I have since accepted many fewer new beliefs than I would otherwise have.
Me four.
Although you know, there is no reason in principle you couldn’t get all that stuff Anders_H is talking about from intro stats, it’s just that stats isn’t taught as well as it can be.