Powered By Blogger

Saturday, December 14, 2024

Correlation Is NOT Causation

Correlation Is NOT Causation

How often you [and me as well] would be correlating things and end up making an assumption that becomes conclusive [BUT very much shaky because that assumption CAN'T stand on its own].  Let's pry into typical 'GIRL's TALK' wherein a girl tells another girl that she had her hair 'rebonded' because she received her 13th month pay?  OR someone is dressed to a 'T' because he/she will attend a social event?  BUT Correlation Is NOT Causation๐Ÿ“˜๐Ÿ“™๐Ÿ“—

Fact is, CORRELATION does NOT imply CAUSATION.  And YET, this seems NOT to stop people from drawing casual inferences from correlational statements .  In fact, we show that people do in fact infer casuality from statements of association under minimal conditions.  Indeed, researches show that people draw pragmatic inferences from ambiguous OR incomplete utterances๐Ÿ’ฅ๐Ÿ’ฅ๐Ÿ’ฅ
Oh, let's have more relatable examples, like when your mobile phone freezes while sending text [SMS] messages.  We might be tempted to make an outright conclusion that your incessant texting caused your mobile phone to freeze.  BUT likely that is NOT the valid root cause.  It could be that your mobile phone's RAM memory is insufficient and that could be caused either by a low RAM memory OR even a high memory that was 'gobbled up' by another mobile app๐Ÿ˜‰๐Ÿ˜‰๐Ÿ˜‰
Problem is, our global village is littered with CORRELATIONS getting equated to CAUSATION.  LIke people with bigger feet mean they are better readers?  LIke if people with fewer black and white TVs, global warming will worsen?  Like, WHEN a continent's name does NOT start with 'A' means that most people born there AREN'T white?  Like WHEN most people die in avalanches WHEN sales of snow chains go up?  We can go and on BUT such is that human frailty of adding 1 + 1๐Ÿ’ฆ๐Ÿ’ฆ๐Ÿ’ฆ
Our takeaway:  Sometimes we humans do have this tendency to either over-simplify a complex situation or conversely, we sometimes tend to complicate even the simplest situations.  Like drowning will NOT lead you to eat more ice cream and it is even highly unlikely that eating more ice cream will dramatically increase one's risk of drowning, so obviously, there can be a strong correlation between two variables without a direct casual relationship.  Conversely, there are correlations that strongly imply CAUSATION, like ice cream sales will shoot up because of high temperatures.  So, by and large, CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION [except except]๐Ÿ’ฅ๐Ÿ’ฅ๐Ÿ’ฅ

No comments:

Post a Comment

Straight from my thought processes...

Are JOKES The Very Antidotes To Stress?

Are JOKES The Very Antidotes To Stress? Are JOKES The Very Antidotes To Stress?  Well, l et le me share this post by Victoria Hardesty @Quor...

Sharing the most popular posts till to date