Quotes About Causation

We cannot observe external things without some degree of Thought; nor can we reflect upon our Thoughts, without being influenced in the course of our reflection by the Things which we have observed.

Why God has instituted Prayer:— To communicate to his creatures the dignity of causation.

Mind is the forerunner of all actions.

We should be careful who we blame for our unhappiness when we ourselves have created the causes for our unhappy experiences.

The fact that one thing precedes another doesn't mean one thing causes another." "Oh," she said. "I know all that. But do I want to risk getting killed for some fucking formal logic rule?" "No," I said. "You don't.

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

Cancer is caused by what you do for many, many years, not what you do for a few weeks or months.

I do absolutely believe that the climate is changing. I'm not prepared to determine causation.

Without awareness of common pitfalls such as confirmation bias, positive-outcome bias, and subjective validation, a person trained in logic and fallacy detection is easily deceived into thinking that he or she has acquired invincible armor against assaults of unreason. Expressions like post hoc ergo propter hoc and false cause, should be informed by knowledge of evolution and how the brain works to jump to conclusions about causal connections.

This context dependency means that rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X.

Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there.'

Christian Science explains all cause and effect as mental, not physical.

The great unity which true science seeks is found only by beginning with our knowledge of God, and coming down from Him along the stream of causation to every fact and event that affects us.

What happens to you happens from you.

One cat leads to another.

The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer.

It's essential to distinguish between events that are really beyond your control and events you caused yourself.

I'm very familiar with how people can confuse correlation with causation.

To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause!

To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause! To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero-worship, if the circumstances are favourable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they should be unfavourable, of persecuting a scapegoat

post hoc ergo propter hoc. In other words, there would be no causal

In other words, if you see a behavior that persists over time, there is likely a mechanism creating that consistent behavior.