Noa's blog » causality http://noa.resare.com moderately interesting words about things going through my mind Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:56:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Cause and effect? http://noa.resare.com/2008/09/cause-and-effect/ http://noa.resare.com/2008/09/cause-and-effect/#comments Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:03:27 +0000 noa http://noa.resare.com/?p=90 I've been doing some reading lately and a topic that has come up more than once is that of false causalities. It seems to be human nature to construct causalities that fit our worldview when in fact the only thing that can be objectively demonstrated is co-variation. We can see this when it comes to non-heterosexuality and the relative occurrence of mental health problems. Some people seems to have their interpretation of the fact that some surveys find depression to be more common among non-heterosexuals than in the general population as a direct cause and effect relation. You're depressed because being gay makes you so! Well, I'm not sure about that, in fact I'm sort of convinced that is not the case. But how do you illustrate that interpreting co-variance as cause and effect is often problematic? With colorful diagrams of course!

Alexander sent me a link to this wonderful piece of graphics, from climate sceptic:

In the comments I found the only relevant question to ask: should we struggle to produce more oil, so the quality of the music will increase, or should we attempt to draft better composers and musicians into rock 'n' roll, so we can have more oil? I'm so confused! At least it made me smile.

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