>Correlation does not imply causation. i think we should stop trotting out this tired nugget without understanding how sparse the alternative is. Even within t

>Correlation does not imply causation. i think we should stop trotting out this tired nugget without understanding how sparse the alternative is. Even within the academic stats community, there’s a fair amount of handwringing that rho is honestly all we have. fpci is one of the most dispiriting theorems in statistics. we get by with rubin models & sem, but these are pretty hokey and outside of social sciences you get laughed at if you say ran an sem. you can regress student score on study time & get a positive coefficient, but then you are setting yourself up - why did you get that positive coefficient ? well it means if he studied longer he would have scored higher. yeah but then why did he not study longer ? the fuck i know! oh wait a minute let’s do sem! ok we can’t observe depression so that’s a latent. and we can’t observe teenage angst so another latent. soon your friendly neighborhood psychologist thinks up half a dozen latent causes. put the whole thing into the sem mixer grinder with score as response. yay sem software gave me significance! ok so depressed teenagers will score poorly on test because they won’t study for it...but wait a minute why are they depressed- oh lets do another sem throw it divorce rate & obesity & lack of religious attendance & regress again....this is when the statistician gets up & says fuck all you assholes you don’t have anything to establish any of these things, you are just grossly misusing linear regression. then the social scientists respond well we don’t need your math kind anyways, we have sem software, its latent turtles all the way down. so what if beta hat is xprime x inverse xprime y? can’t publish a psych paper with just that. gotta have my latent goodies. causal inference ftw! god sometimes this whole field makes me hurl.