4 ms·
Billions? What does that have to do with anything?
by andrewljohnson 16y ago
Billions? What does that have to do with anything?
- jarek 16y agoIt rather destroys the supposed correlation between crappy jobs and awesome people.
- jfager 16y agoNo, it doesn't. Correlation is not causation. If awesome people have worked crappy jobs more often than not, there can still be a positive correlation between the two variables even if there are dramatically fewer awesome people than people who have worked crappy jobs.
- jarek 16y agoYes, it does. Crappy jobs won't be correlated with awesome people -- which was andrewljohnson's original claim -- to any meaningful degree given the billions of unawesome people. Since correlation is symmetric, awesome people will not be meaningfully correlated with crappy jobs, either.
- jfager 16y agoPlot every person in the world on a two dimension grid. Dimension x is awesomeness, dimension y is crappiness of crappiest job. Vast majority of people will be clustered around top left of graph (unawesome people with crappy jobs). But if the mean y value fluctuates upwards as you move to the right along x, then there's a positive correlation, regardless of whether or not there are significantly fewer data points further to the right. Read the "Correlation and linearity" section of the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence
- plorkyeran 16y agoIt suggests that the awesome people with backgrounds in crappy jobs got out of the crappy jobs because they're awesome, rather than being awesome because they did crappy jobs.
- jfager 16y agoCorrelation is not causation. You could just as easily interpret his statement as P(CJ|A) > P(CJ|~A): the conditional probability that someone had a crappy job at some point in their life given that they're awesome is higher than the conditional probability they did given that they aren't.
- andrewljohnson 16y agoIf you only look at the set of people who work in white collar jobs, I would wager those who previously had blue-collar jobs exhibit some positive characteristics. I don't think that the set of all people who have had or currently have a blue-collar job is particularly relevant to the argument, other than as a backdrop for speculation.
- silverbax88 16y agoA better question would be "How many awesome people.." Just asking how many people doesn't disprove anything.