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No, 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
by jfager 16y ago
No, 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