4 ms·

Correlation != causation.

• jerf 16y ago
  Yes, but so what? "Correlation != causation" != "no relationship so we can all just stop thinking about it". Whether it's causative, reverse causative, or two things caused by a shared third factor that may also have other effects, there's a there there that can't be waved away by a trite, fashionable two words and a math symbol. Careful reading of the "bottom line" winestock posted will show that (s)he actually understands this.
  • wzdd 16y ago
    > Careful reading of the "bottom line" winestock posted will show that (s)he actually understands this. This is incorrect. Winestock: > Bottom line: Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive. A third possibility, one of many, is "Lack of religion and a fertility rate less than 2.0 occur co-incidentally in seven countries". Given that we have only examined nine countries of a possible 195 (or so), I think that this third option is at least possible.
    • jerf 16y ago
      Accuracy of the data in question is a separate issue. My point was merely that the possibility of non-causation was covered. Inaccurate data is still not "correlation != causation" (it supercedes it).
      • wzdd 16y ago
        Even if winestock compiled a complete list of 195 countries, their religiosity, and their fertility rates, and showed a correlation between them (which it seems is unlikely -- see for example steadicat's post, or my other post), it would still be wrong to conclude, as winestock did, that > Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive. There is at least one other possibility, which is that there is no link between religion and fertility, even transitively.
• sin7 16y ago
  So, what's your point? We have all had this ingrained in us since our first statistics class. Saying that correlation does not equal causation really says nothing. It does not agree. It does not disagree. The only thing this does is easily dismiss something of importance, which by definition has a connection to the discussion. Correlation != causation is laziness at it finest.
• winestock 16y ago
  "Correlation != causation" is a warning sign not a stop sign. If we find a correlation, then that's a sign that we should look deeper. So far, the evidence says that lack of religion is tightly connected with a drop in fertility. If something other than lack of religion is causing the drop then the best place to look for it is by checking those factors that are most common to the irreligious and least common among the religious. If someone has done this research then I am unaware of it.
  • tokenadult 16y ago
    "Correlation != causation" is a warning sign not a stop sign. I might add that for social causation issues like this, longitudinal data (studies of changes over time) are often much more informative than cross-sectional data (comparisons of different subgroups at the same time). You and the original submitter posted longitudinal data, studied by researchers who have a data model that they are further investigating. That's at least worth talking about here. After edit: as several replies have helpfully noted, one way to test the proposed model is to look at data from other countries, and another way to test it would be to look at data from different (earlier) historical periods in the same or different countries. Much work needs to be done to accept the causal mechanism proposed in the submitted link, but meanwhile we can check the narrower issue of whether participation in organized religion has the same time trend (reduction over time) as fertility rates in various countries of interest.
    • notahacker 16y ago
      A study which also attempted to model societies that weren't trending towards religious extinction be a lot more useful (the states were most likely chosen for readily available data rather than being selected due to being exceptional in their levels of religious disaffiliation). Right now I'm seeing a correlation between "nations which make detailed census data available in convenient form to academic researchers" and increasing levels of religious disaffiliation and low birth rates. The same model would probably fit quite well to countries where there's a marked trend increase in a specific religious affiliation, like Indonesia where dominant and growing Islam may hypothetically be decades away from making other affiliations extinct. Does Indonesia have a correspondingly much higher fertility rate? Actually no (~2.28), especially not if you control for other variables like poverty and infant mortality that are known to be correlated with high fertility rates. And it's dropping.
• revorad 16y ago
  Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'. --Randall Munroe