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[[All other things being equal]], a [[correlation]] is more likely to evidence a [[causation]] than a ''lack'' of correlation, right? This is one of those logical canards, as Monty Python put it, “[[universal affirmative]]s can only be partially converted: all of Alma Cogan is dead, but only some of the class of dead people are Alma Cogan.” | [[All other things being equal]], a [[correlation]] is more likely to evidence a [[causation]] than a ''lack'' of correlation, right? This is one of those logical canards, as Monty Python put it, “[[universal affirmative]]s can only be partially converted: all of Alma Cogan is dead, but only some of the class of dead people are Alma Cogan.” | ||
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. | |||
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''. | |||