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You need to perform an intervention to test for correlation vs. causation, and that would involve getting lots of normal children, and traumatising half of them
by hessenwolf 16y ago
You need to perform an intervention to test for correlation vs. causation, and that would involve getting lots of normal children, and traumatising half of them. Those studies are considered a bit retro in the scientific community, for some reason.
- goodside 16y agoJudea Pearl disagrees.
- tokenadult 16y agoLinks about Judea Pearl: http://www.danielpearl.org/about_us/Judea_Pearl.html http://www.danielpearl.org/about_us/Judea_Pearl.html http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/R320.pdf http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/R320.pdf The usual link to Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) on experimental research, which is good food for thought: http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
- hessenwolf 16y agoHe disagrees with the idea that traumatising children is retro, or with the causation vs causality? It's been a few years since I read the book, but I had his do() operator in mind when I wrote the comment. Edit: Okay - I clearly have to clarify my comment. Intervention studies are not retro. Studies in which you deliberately traumatise children, however, went out with Ceacescu. I was making a joke (albeit apparently a poor one).
- ffffruit 16y agoI do not think they are considered retro. Interventional studies are widely considered the "golden" standard but they are not perfect and, in many cases, not feasible. Like you point out, in many cases, it would not be ethical to perform one ; for example, making people smoke on purpose and then try out smoking cessation interventions on them. "Luckily" though, people usually self-select their selves into these categories.