Correlation: Difference between revisions

Correlation (view source)

Revision as of 09:32, 17 October 2020

323 bytes added , 17 October 2020

no edit summary

Amwelladmin

Bureaucrats, Interface administrators, Administrators

82,891

edits

@@ Line 17: / Line 17: @@
 So here’s the thing, and I am straining to avoid distracting myself onto my pet subjects of transcendent truth and causal skepticism, so bear with me:
-Even if you accept some objectivist model where, whether we can know it or not, there ''is'' a true, unique, cause for every effect — and down that rabbit hole are a bunch of consequences you really wouldn’t like, but let’s say — it follows that an event can have but one cause, or causal matrix, to the absolute exclusion of any other explanation. That is to say, for every single true cause, there are multiple [[spurious correlation]]s — events that serendipitously ''seem'', by their statistical regularity, to have causal significance, but in fact don’t.
+Even if you accept some [[reductionism|objectivist ]] model where, whether we can know it or not, there ''is'' a true, unique, cause for every effect — and down that rabbit hole are a bunch of consequences you really wouldn’t like, but let’s say — it follows that an event must have but ''one'' cause, or causal matrix, to the absolute exclusion of any other explanation.
+That is to say, for every single true cause, there are multiple [[spurious correlation]]s — events that serendipitously ''seem'', by their statistical regularity, to have causal significance to a given effect but, in fact, don’t.
 How many is “multiple”? ''Depends on how much data, and how much imagination, you’ve got''. Seeing as [[the portion of all data we have collected is nil]], the actual answer is that ''there are infinitely more spurious correlations than there are true ones''. The likelihood that any given correlation is the true cause is 1/∞, which is ''zero''.
+A lack of correlation may not increase the likelihood of events being causally related, ''but nor does a correlation''. Especially seeing as there maybe some data, as yet uncollected, or unnarratised, that explains the decorrelation of events that are, in fact, causally related.
 {{sa}}
 *[[In God we trust, all others must bring data]]