Quotes About Correlation

The procedure I adopted to tame the halo effect conforms to a general principle: decorrelate error!

Recall that the correlation between two measures—in the present case reading age and GPA—is equal to the proportion of shared factors among their determinants.

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations.

is also the case that depressed children who spend some time standing on their head or hug a cat for twenty minutes a day will also show improvement. Most readers of such headlines will automatically infer that the energy drink or the cat hugging caused an improvement, but this conclusion is completely unjustified. Depressed

Start with an estimate of average GPA. Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA.

could have had a skiing accident during adolescence that left her slightly impaired, and so on. Recall that the correlation between two measures—in the present case reading age and GPA—is equal to the proportion of shared factors among their determinants. What is your best guess about that proportion? My most optimistic guess is about 30%.

Permitting statistical treatment and the hypnotic presence of numbers and decimal points to befog causal relationships is little better than superstition.

Self esteem and depression go hand in hand. They are directly proportionate to each other and if there is variation in one then there will be a variation in the other one as well.

Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. Errors in individual judgment won't wreck the group's collective judgment as long as those errors aren't systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people's judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information.

I found a correlation between the spreading of democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise in slavery. Now, as countries, former Communist countries, became so-called democratic, people started to be enslaved by their own countrymen.

Obviously, not all migration relates to global warming, but the correlation is higher than most would think.

All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.

The errors of muddling correlation with causation, necessary condition with sufficient causation, and sufficient causation with identity lie at the heart of the neuromaniac's basic assumption that consciousness and nerve impulses are one and the same, and that (to echo a commonly used formulation) "the mind is a creation of the brain".

I am now going to argue that neuroscience does not address, even less answer, the fundamental question of the relation(s) between matter and mind, body and mind, or brain and mind. If it seems to do so this is only the result of a confusion between, indeed a conflation of, three quite different relations: correlation, causation and identity.

'Man Push Cart' is very similar to 'Take Out.'

They used the fail-safe method for undergraduate work at any solid institution: take two utterly unrelated things or matters and show that they are, if not in fact identical, actually related in the most profound and subtle sense.

Gregory S. Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society (2005), systematically compared seventeen economically developed nations, and reached the devastating conclusion that 'higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies'.

Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism.

Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one's intelligence and/or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind.

Michael Shermer, in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, describes a large survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism

Life wouldn't be easier or not easier. Aren't both generalizations logically impossible? Since there's no correlation, there can be no comparison.

Donald Trump disproved the notion that there is a direct dollar-for-dollar correlation between how much money you had in your traditional war chest and what your election outcome was going to be.

There's zero correlation between owning music and being a greater music lover or musician than the next person.

Thoughts are nothing but cause and effect.