I do worry sometimes that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, and that people are starting using correlation-causation as an I’m-smarter-than-you sort of status signal—that is, once people pass a certain intelligence level I worry less about them claiming Facebook causes the Greek debt crisis because they’re correlated, and more about them hearing a very well-conducted study showing an r = .98 correlation between some disease and some risk factor, and instead of agreeing we should investigate further they just say “HA! GOTCHA! CORRELATION’S NOT THE SAME THING AS CAUSATION!”
I mean, I admit it’s an important lesson, as long as people remember it’s just a caution against being too certain of a causal relationship, and not a guarantee that a correlation provides absolutely no evidence.
This seems crucial to me; you’re really talking about a few percent of the population, right?
Also, I’ll note that when (even very smart) people are motivated to believe in the existence of a phenomenon they’re apt to attribute causal structure in.correlated data.
For example: It’s common wisdom among math teachers that precalculus is important preparation for calculus. Surely taking precalculus has some positive impact on calculus performance but I would guess that this impact is swamped by preexisting variance in mathematical ability/preparation.
I strongly suggest you read one of Fisher’s articles on the subject. Fisher did not deny that smoking contributes to lung cancer, just argued that the Hill and Doll reports failed to establish a causal link. He argued that the negative correlation between cancer and inhaling, the rate of increase in lung cancer incidence for each sex not matching the rates of smoking adoption for each sex, the high correlation with lung cancer for heavy cigarette smoking but not cigar or pipe smoking, and the correlation between lung cancer incidence and urban location all discount the hypothesis that cancer results from tobacco combustion products passing through the lungs in favor of other hypotheses. He did not claim that causality can not be established, and indeed proposed experiments to distinguish between some of the alternate explanations.
I do worry sometimes that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, and that people are starting using correlation-causation as an I’m-smarter-than-you sort of status signal—that is, once people pass a certain intelligence level I worry less about them claiming Facebook causes the Greek debt crisis because they’re correlated, and more about them hearing a very well-conducted study showing an r = .98 correlation between some disease and some risk factor, and instead of agreeing we should investigate further they just say “HA! GOTCHA! CORRELATION’S NOT THE SAME THING AS CAUSATION!”
I mean, I admit it’s an important lesson, as long as people remember it’s just a caution against being too certain of a causal relationship, and not a guarantee that a correlation provides absolutely no evidence.
This seems crucial to me; you’re really talking about a few percent of the population, right?
Also, I’ll note that when (even very smart) people are motivated to believe in the existence of a phenomenon they’re apt to attribute causal structure in.correlated data.
For example: It’s common wisdom among math teachers that precalculus is important preparation for calculus. Surely taking precalculus has some positive impact on calculus performance but I would guess that this impact is swamped by preexisting variance in mathematical ability/preparation.
Do you have any particular reason to think that this is likely to be a problem?
Personal observation.
Fisher’s denial that smoking contributed to lung cancer.
I strongly suggest you read one of Fisher’s articles on the subject. Fisher did not deny that smoking contributes to lung cancer, just argued that the Hill and Doll reports failed to establish a causal link. He argued that the negative correlation between cancer and inhaling, the rate of increase in lung cancer incidence for each sex not matching the rates of smoking adoption for each sex, the high correlation with lung cancer for heavy cigarette smoking but not cigar or pipe smoking, and the correlation between lung cancer incidence and urban location all discount the hypothesis that cancer results from tobacco combustion products passing through the lungs in favor of other hypotheses. He did not claim that causality can not be established, and indeed proposed experiments to distinguish between some of the alternate explanations.
I was mostly going to say (1), but (2) certainly crossed my mind as an example of the other sort of error.