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A better example is drinking. Say a study clearly shows that low social economic status people drink twice as much alcohol as other people. This doesn't show th
by logicchains 3y ago
A better example is drinking. Say a study clearly shows that low social economic status people drink twice as much alcohol as other people. This doesn't show that being low social economic status causes people to drink more. But regardless of that, if you wanted to date people who drank less alcohol, on average by dating only people of non-low SES you'd be dating people who drank half as much compared to if you only dated people of low SES.
I.e. if A is a reliable predictor of B, it doesn't matter whether A caused B or both A and B are caused by some other factor; A is still a reliable predictor regardless.
- n9 3y agoagree -- all this reminds me of a study that indicated that people that used LSD even one time were like 5x as likely to suffer from depression later in life. I've always thought that it was very interesting that the conclusion drawn was that LSD made you depressed vs. asking questions about the correlation. it is funny, really how obvious the angle is in these kinds of analysis. There's no way you could even start to draw conclusions from these kinds of data sets unless you already knew what you were going to report -- there's less than no information in the numbers being used... the only rational analysis would result in nothing but questions and absolutely no conclusions.
- dudeinjapan 3y agoThey should have done a study on what % of people who tried LSD realized that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. (RIP Bill Hicks)