3 ms·
>I'm not sure what it is, but humans seem to be highly suceptable to simple explanations for the world. Most things really are simple; If you see smoke, the si
by omginternets 11y ago
>I'm not sure what it is, but humans seem to be highly suceptable to simple explanations for the world.
Most things really are simple; If you see smoke, the simplest explanation happens to be correct: there's fire.
The bias towards simplicity can also be seen as a bias towards parsimony, which is almost always a good thing. We don't immediately recognize this truth because we don't conjure up trivial examples, even though the overwhelming majority of our reasoning is spent on trivial phenomena.
- Houshalter 11y agoAlso he's disputing a straw man. No one has claimed that all crime can be explained by a single variable. Only that a variable can have a big effect. Other "simple explanations" for crime could be poverty, broken homes, education, all the traditional explanations. All those are simple explanations and single variables.
- omginternets 11y agoI understood his claim a bit differently, namely as "Lead is an epiphenomenon, and a single variable with a big effect is likely to be an epiphenomenon". To be sure, I think the logic goes like this: - Lead is positively correlated with crime - Reduction in lead-levels is associated with multiple factors that are in turn associated with gentrification - Thus, these gentrification factors are the true cause, and lead-levels just happen to correlate with them.