4 ms·
I love this comment. It gets to the heart of a scientific inquiry. Many experiments are just like this. You try to control for as many variables as you can,
by Periodic 17y ago
I love this comment. It gets to the heart of a scientific inquiry. Many experiments are just like this. You try to control for as many variables as you can, then you test variations on the remaining variables. Observing the effects you can start to see how the two are correlated, which would be impossible to isolate from real-world data.
Of course, the post is not necessarily applicable to the real world because the original assumption may be incorrect.
- dangoldin 17y agoIdeally you would be able to carry out such an experiment but as troystribling mentions it's possible that an increase in the safety of cars may lead people to drive more dangerously. It's hard to isolate this correlation. An experiment may be to show that holding everything else constant, a car from 2009 would lead to 50% fewer serious accidents. If we look at the data and notice that there were only 25% fewer accidents, we would then conclude that it may have come from the factors mentioned.