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You're right the authors have not proven causality (they did find correlation though). They don't claim that either, they say it's consistent. Causality is typ
by cycomanic 6y ago
You're right the authors have not proven causality (they did find correlation though). They don't claim that either, they say it's consistent. Causality is typically difficult to prove.
However, to verify your objection you need to first give the parameter that they have not used, and second come up with a good causality why your parameter explains the variation better (hint second letter of the county name is not it).
- amluto 6y agoI beg to differ. The authors did not find a parameter other than death penalty rate that predicts death penalty rate. They claim that this implies that the high death penalty rates happen because the death penalty rate was high. This authors are _wrong_: this conclusion does not follow from their analysis; their analysis is unsound. A demonstration of unsoundness does not require a proof that the conclusion is wrong; unsoundness means that the argument is wrong. The onus is in the authors to present a sound argument, not on the reader of the paper to demonstrate that the conclusion is incorrect. (As a different example, Andrew Wiles’ first proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was unsound. This didn’t mean that the theorem wasn’t true; it meant that Wiles failed to prove it. Similarly, in my opinion, the authors of this paper have not provided sound evidence in favor of their claim. This doesn’t mean I disbelieve their conclusion.)