3 ms·

There's an old phrase: "Correlation is not causation." "TV" to "civil rights" - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TV%2C%28civil+rights*4%29&year_st

There's an old phrase: "Correlation is not causation." "TV" to "civil rights" - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TV%2C%28civil+rights*4%29&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-US-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TV%2C%28civil+... "Plastic" to "civil rights" - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=plastic%2C%28civil+rights*3.4%29&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-US-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=plastic%2C%28c... "Pakistan" to "civil right" - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28Pakistan%29%2C%28civil+rights%29&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-US-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28Pakistan%29... The site https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations shows a lot of spurious correlations. What I did instead was present a claim (Wikipedia links to https://books.google.com/books?id=sl5GAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT45 https://books.google.com/books?id=sl5GAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT45 and also describes the technology that made colored chalkboards popular), then double-checked that Ngram was consistent with the claim. > That seems reasonable to me Yes, that's because your hypersensitivity is kicking in. It's causing you to reject the actual reasons given at the time in favor of your pet theory. I've presented two direct quotes from the 1950s saying the reason for switching to "chalkboard" is because the new boards were not black. You instead prefer to think these sources were hiding the truth, apparently in order to cover up hypersensitivty to the word "black". Another problem with your pet theory is that in the 1950s black people were generally referred to as "colored" or "Negro". "Black" didn't start replacing "Negro" until the 1960s. Your James Brown citation is from the late 1960s, for example. Your belief is that large numbers of people in the 1950s were so hypersensitive to the word "black", because someday in the future it might be used to refer to colored people, that they switched from "blackboard" to "chalkboard"? While at the same time large numbers of people enforced racial segregation and discrimination. Your pet theory would need a LOT of historical supporting evidence to hold any water. So, where's your evidence?

jjgreen 4y ago
I've presented two direct quotes from the 1950s saying the reason for switching to "chalkboard" is because the new boards were not black. There's an old saying: "One swallow does not make a summer". It means that one should be careful extrapolating from slight evidence. So how does your pet theory handle that the same phenomenon, a shift from blackboard to chalkboard, also happened in the UK (which also had a period of co-incident racial tension, albeit not as extreme as in the US) while, as others have mentioned, green blackboards are rare?
- eesmith 4y ago
  My point was to demonstrate that your "hypersensitivity" hypothesis has no evidentiary basis, and in fact runs counter to easily available evidence. I believe I have done that, in way that other HN readers can easily verify for themselves. Had you researched the topic yourself you would find more supporting evidence for my pet theory. I only presented a sampling of what I found, to keep my comment from being a wall of text. Your saying doesn't even apply to you as you have not presented any evidence, not even a single feather. As you don't seem to care, my interest here is done.

jjgreen 4y ago

I've presented two direct quotes from the 1950s saying the reason for switching to "chalkboard" is because the new boards were not black. There's an old saying: "One swallow does not make a summer". It means that one should be careful extrapolating from slight evidence. So how does your pet theory handle that the same phenomenon, a shift from blackboard to chalkboard, also happened in the UK (which also had a period of co-incident racial tension, albeit not as extreme as in the US) while, as others have mentioned, green blackboards are rare?

eesmith 4y ago
My point was to demonstrate that your "hypersensitivity" hypothesis has no evidentiary basis, and in fact runs counter to easily available evidence. I believe I have done that, in way that other HN readers can easily verify for themselves. Had you researched the topic yourself you would find more supporting evidence for my pet theory. I only presented a sampling of what I found, to keep my comment from being a wall of text. Your saying doesn't even apply to you as you have not presented any evidence, not even a single feather. As you don't seem to care, my interest here is done.