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It all depends on the sample size. If sufficient money is put towards it you will find the correlation. People have also done studies on this for around 50 year
by nonbel 10y ago
It all depends on the sample size. If sufficient money is put towards it you will find the correlation. People have also done studies on this for around 50 years, everything is correlated with everything else:
'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.'
https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf
"One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square"
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY3801H/readings/Readings%20-%2003Bakan%201966.pdf http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38...
"...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p < 10–6)."
http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/meehl1967.pdf http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...
- btilly 10y agoYeah, everything is correlated with everything, and a principal component analysis will quickly sort out the source. For example what songs you like is tied to what media you watch which is tied to what politics you have. And most of that is tied to how liberal vs conservative you are. It doesn't take many principal components to make most of the remaining correlations very small. But correlations between astrological descriptions and personality start off small. So small that astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people.
- nonbel 10y ago>"astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people." I never said it was. My problem is with the prevailing philosophy of doing statistical tests on whether there is exactly zero effect/correlation, ie testing for deviation from noise/chance. It is the most destructive idea ever pushed by mathematicians.