3 ms·
Increasingly I'm finding that any description of causation/correlation which (a) isn't written by a more or less formally trained statistician of some variety o
by tel 12y ago
Increasingly I'm finding that any description of causation/correlation which (a) isn't written by a more or less formally trained statistician of some variety or (b) invoking Pearl-like causal diagrams directly has a coin-flip's chance of being actively dangerous to read.
Causation is super tricky business. You probably have an okay model of it intuitively once you've done a little stats work, but to explain it to someone else or tackle it in more exotic or hypothetical domains is an exercise is insanity if you're not armed with the very best tools.
- rflrob 12y agoCausation is dead simple---if you can directly manipulate the putative causal variable. Otherwise, you're left with the old saw about correlation, and while you might be able to tell a story about why there should be causation, the best you can do in that case is eliminate other potential confounds.
- tel 12y agoIt's simple in models where you assume you understand the causal structure. Then whenever things get murky people tend to try to operate without clarifying the causal structure and end up in a bind. Of course what you say is true, but executing it in practice and having a sufficiently rich language to identify confounders well is what's usually lacking.