Also, people undergoing chemotherapy are more likely to die of cancer than people who aren’t.
Tweedledee: “I used to think correlation proved causation. Then I took a statistics class. Now I don’t think that way anymore.”
Tweedledum: “So, the class helped?”
Tweedledee: “Well, maybe.”
psst. Look at post #6
I’m not sure if this thread has consistently distinguished between those cases, but just to be clear the correlation between height and first name is one of the cases which involves a common cause.
Oops. How embarrassing. Though, not necessarily because you pointed it out to me.
Dog owners prefer Ragu; cat owners prefer Prego.
The obviousness of this fallacy isn’t obvious in this discussion for me at the moment. Because they’re all humans and humans have names?
To return, for a moment, to the OP:
A: What are you doing?
B: I’m applying tiger repellent.
A: But there are no tigers around here.
B: See? It works!
“Americans whose first name ends with a vowel are signficantly shorter than Americans whose first name does not end with a vowel”
This is because women tend to be significantly shorter than men, and American first names for women tend to end in a vowel, while American first names for men rarely end in a vowel - thus “having a first name that ends with a vowel” is a good proxy for being shorter than average, even though the name didn’t cause the shortness, and the shortness didn’t directly cause the name.
This, along with the crow causing the sun to rise and criminals drink milk as kids examples, is something more like confirmation bias than correlation not implying causation. There isn’t actually a correlation between the variables. The observer is merely ignoring that people who don’t use repellent aren’t getting attacked (or that the sun always rises or that every kid drinks milk). In order for there to be a correlation, those things would have to not be true to some significant degree.
Well, OK, it is probably true that being female causes one to tend to be shorter than average, but does being female tend to cause one to have a name ending in a vowel? It seems to me that that might be just a mere coincidental correlation. Female names (in our culture) just happen to often end in vowels, but there is nothing about lacking a Y chromosome that makes that so.
A person’s foot size and their ability to do mathematics are highly correlated. It’s a heteroskedastic relationship though - there’s a much higher variance in mathematic ability among large foot people than small foot people, who are fairly uniformly limited in their ability to do math.
Depends on how you want to slice it. If you start by assume that a culture typically has different names for boys and girls, then you could say that a child being a girl causes that child to have a culturally-female name. If you further assume from the start that we’re working with the set of names that modern American culture considers female, then you could say that a child being a girl causes her to have one of the names from that set.
Is that true? Where did you hear that?
I’m guessing that people who eat Count Chocula tend to be kids and people who eat oatmeal tend to be much older.
So are you saying that something that is a mere fortuitous correlation can turn something into a cause?
No one has answered to you, so I’ll try. As Kimmy_Gibbler explained using mathematical notation, the point is simply that this kind of example for correlation without causation is not a suitable example, since there is no correlation at all. As Baracus explains in post #90, these “examples” are based more on a confirmation bias. Since every kid drinks milk, both the criminals and non-criminals will be separate subsets of the ex-milk drinker population, and no meaningful correlations can be established. So using this kind of examples to show how correlation doesn’t prove causation doesn’t work because they lack even the correlation part already.
I was thinking that being born female in the context of American culture causes a person to be likely to be given a name that ends with a vowel sound (much as being born in France causes a person to grow up speaking French). I wouldn’t call either fact coincidental, but I agree they are both arbitrary facts, and are not caused in the same way that lacking a Y chromosome causes to female features, or having two blue-eyed parents causes one to have blue eyes.
I’m surprised that no one has brought up the video game/violence political argument.
Here’s a nice one from today’s paper: “College students who watch reality television beauty shows are at least twice as likely as nonviewers to use tanning lamps or tan outdoors for hours at a time, according to a U.S. study.”
Watching reality beauty shows does not cause students to use tanning lamps, nor does using tanning lamps cause students to watch beauty shows. There is, however, reason to believe that certain students are more likely to do both. That’s a case where a third factor is the common link, and possible causative factor, to the observed behaviors.