[HN Gopher] When correlation is better than causation
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       When correlation is better than causation
        
       Author : mattjstar
       Score  : 12 points
       Date   : 2021-08-27 12:55 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.narrator.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.narrator.ai)
        
       | Mattasher wrote:
       | If you like this, you may be interested in my episode about Cargo
       | Cults, and the value of letting go of causality completely:
       | 
       | https://mattasher.com/2020/04/29/the-filter-podcast-episode-...
        
       | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
       | Tl;Dr: never, but causality is hard to establish much of the
       | time, so sometimes we must do without. To be honest, I don't find
       | this very convincing. Most of the insights seem pretty obvious.
       | Like if you're working from the point of correlating totals
       | across differently sized legs of an experiment, you're starting
       | from a really bad place.
       | 
       | Personally, I'm not quite positive that I buy that causation is
       | _that_ hard to establish in many cases. Don 't give up on that
       | idea. One thing I would say is that if you have a strong prior
       | reason to believe that one thing causes another thing, finding
       | that they are strongly correlated, that can be a useful datum.
       | Mainly the important thing is to understand the limitations of
       | correlation to guide decisionmaking.
        
         | jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
         | I think you'd find Judea Pearl's work interesting.
        
         | dbt00 wrote:
         | starting with correlation and asserting causation is bad,
         | starting with causation and using correlation as weak evidence
         | is good.
        
           | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
           | Precisely (or to be really specific, starting with a
           | suspicion of causation and using correlation as one piece of
           | weak evidence).
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | wahern wrote:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning
       | 
       | > [Abductive reasoning] starts with an observation or set of
       | observations and then seeks the simplest and most likely
       | conclusion from the observations. This process, unlike deductive
       | reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not positively
       | verify it. Abductive conclusions are thus qualified as having a
       | remnant of uncertainty or doubt, which is expressed in retreat
       | terms such as "best available" or "most likely". One can
       | understand abductive reasoning as inference to the best
       | explanation.
       | 
       | > In the 1990s, as computing power grew, the fields of law,
       | computer science, and artificial intelligence research spurred
       | renewed interest in the subject of abduction.
       | 
       | Abductive reasoning is basically how one would formally describe
       | 1) the practice of medicine, including diagnosis, 2) the rules
       | for evidence in legal trials, 3) the process for generating
       | hypotheses in science, and innumerable similar activities we
       | undertake daily.
       | 
       | And for obvious reasons there's a close relationship between
       | abductive reasoning and Bayesian statistics.
        
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