The one I always use is “All heroin users drank milk when they were children. Milk drinking causes heroin use.”
The ones above on sickle cell and autism are correct and difficult but worth knowing and analyzing.
I disagree:
From the examples on this thread we are seeing a strong correlation between variables which correlate and there being no causation between these variables.
I take this correlation as evidence that correlation of variables causes them not be caused by each other.
Certainly.
I recently completed an examination of all the records for all persons incarcerated for violet crimes.
My findings were that 100% of them started out life by drinking milk.
Damn cows!!!
Diet drinks do not cause obesity despite the fact that many obese people drink them.
Ditto. Not that one cite is a summer.
Of which in particular would you say this is true?
I’ve noticed a strong correlation between people posting in this thread and people not knowing what correlation means.
True, but the webcomic people have referred to in this thread in no wise makes that mistake. Look at the mouseover text.
[Heavy sigh] And that is called being a cause of lung cancer. For just about any cause and effect pair in existence, you can find further events in the causal connection between them that may legitimately be viewed as intervening causes. Indeed, I am sure that, on your virus story (which, incidentally, you have still not done anything to substantiate) there are events in the cell that intervene between the virus being there in a smoke damaged cell and the cell actually beginning to divide cancerously. They are all causes of the cancer too.
But obesity does cause consumption of diet drinks.
Not exclusively. It could be the fear of obesity. But anyway, an alien landing on Earth might see obese people drinking diet drinks and conclude diet drinks cause obesity, and it’s not true.
This exemplifies another problem with the webcomic level of understanding. You can indeed run a correlation between two binary variables (X=drank milk as a child, yes or no; Y=became a violent criminal in adulthood, yes or no). But my guess is that since nearly everyone drank milk as child, the correlation coefficient would be close to zero. That is, if your X-series is nearly entirely 1s and your Y-series is a random sequence of 0s and 1s, no correlation would be demonstrated. Still further, it would show P(became a violent criminal in adulthood|drank milk as a child)= P(became a violent criminal in adulthood).
A good one is the claim that diet sodas cause weight gain, because many people who drank diet soda gained weight.
People often claim that obesity is rife among poor people, so they can’t be that poor.
I’m confused. You are fleshing out the milk/heroin false syllogism, or saying that there might be situations in which a true-quick assumption of the falseness is actually incorrect (“a problem with [this] web comic-type example”)?
Sorry to be dense.
Not really. Many people drink them because they are overweight, no obese. Many people drink them because they fear becoming overweight/obese. Many people drink them because they are diabetic. Many people drink them because sugar is bad for their teeth.
IOW, while it’s true that many people who are obese consume diet drinks for that reason, it’s not by any means the only reason.
I’m not rushing to provide cites because it opens a can of worms. The internet is full of competing stories by advocates on either side making claims that are difficult to verify.
Here for example is a cite from an MD who claims to have analyzed WHO/CDC data. This same paper is also used by right-wing political sites that claim scientists are always lying to the public. So without further information about this doctor I have no idea whether he knows what he’s talking about.
Here is an example of site that claims that smoking does cause cancer. Despite that claim, the experiment cited within it shows that exposing lung cells to cigarette smoke, and hydrogen peroxide on top of that, failed to cause cancer.
If I have the time and patience later on, I’ll try to dig through the material again.
But the lack of a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer is not new. I was surprised to hear about it myself, over 20 years ago.
I never claimed that lung cancer was caused by a virus. The cause is unknown, and a virus is a hypothetical cause. Radon exposure is another.
There is some specific cause of lung cancer (assuming it’s not magic), and plenty of research has shown cigarette smoking is not it. Only 1/3 of smokers ever develop lung cancer, and around 30% of people who do develop lung cancer are not smokers*. If you want to extend the chain of causation then you may as well call breathing a cause of a lung cancer.
*This is a tough are to straighten out. Until recently many people had smoked some cigarettes in their lifetime. There are some making the claim that even smoking one cigarette in a lifetime will lead to lung cancer. The percentage of people who have non-smoking related lung cancer is probably lower than 30%.
Before the point is lost, the cause of lung cancer is unknown. Cigarette smoking may one day turn out to be the cause. But that is not determined by the strength of the correlation. That will be determined by proof of a causative mechanism.
My favorite example was used in two different psych 100 classes I’ve taken:
In this community, there live 10,000 people and 200 storks. After 10 years, now there’s 20,000 people and 400 storks. Why did the stork population increase?
After some spurious discussion about storks bringing babies and some garden-path thinking that that somehow the storks caused the increase in people (e.g. “More people moved in because the storks were a tourist attraction?”) the usual answer is that storks eat trash, and thus as the population increased, there was enough trash to support a larger colony of birds.
What I like about it is that it flips the original idea (more storks caused more humans) and there is a real causative relationship, but in the opposite direction (more humans caused more storks.)
This is very confusing. Your statement that “there is some specific cause of lung cancer” is strange. There are many types of lung cancer and even more causes of lung cancer. That doesn’t mean there is no causal relationship between tobacco smoke and some common types of lung cancer.
To extend your analogy, many people who are hit by cars do not suffer broken bones, and many people with broken bones have never been hit by a car, so therefore being hit by a car does not cause broken bones.
There is one type of lung cancer most strongly associated with cigarette smoking. The research I’ve seen separates that from the other forms.
You are missing the point. We can say getting hit by a car causes broken bones because we can prove the causative relationship, not because of the high correlation between the two.
I never claimed that it was the only reason, nor an absolute reason: There are obese people who drink full-Calorie drinks, and there are people of healthy weight who drink diet drinks. But to the extent that there’s a correlation between obesity and consumption of diet drinks, it’s mostly because of obesity causing the consumption.