Quotes About Causation

Alternative explanations for these changing patterns of racial differences—such as racism, poverty or inferior education among blacks—cannot establish even correlation with changing employment outcomes over the years, because all those things were worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948 was far lower and not significantly different from the unemployment rate among white teenagers.

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten

If white racism is the cause of lower educational and economic outcomes for black Americans, why are black Nigerians exempt?

These were neither the first nor the last times when statistical disparities led people to jump to conclusions about villainy being the cause. False assumptions as to causation are more than intellectual errors, and their consequences go far beyond economic losses.

Broadly speaking, the new moral history employed in this book is concerned with the nature of causation and agency in the course of human events. It attempts to explain behavior in given historical contexts by showing the relationship between principles and practice in the day-to-day actions and interactions of men and women in a social context.

When common sense sees a puzzling phenomenon it looks for a causal agent. When it sees organization it looks for an organizer. This works amazingly well for purposes ranging from the diagnosis of diseases to the creation of governments. But it cannot account for emergence ... the appearance of complex phenomena not predictable from the basic elements and processes alone.

The inseparability of junk science from junk thought is evinced by the telltale marks of endemic illogic coupled, in many instances, with deliberate manipulativeness. The first and most fundamental warning sign is an inability to distinguish between coincidence and causation--a basic requirement for scientific literacy.

perception of causation has a biological foundation.

This nationality business helps you make a great story and satisfies your hunger for ascription of causes. It seems to be the dump site where all explanations go until one can ferret out a more obvious one (such as, say, some evolutionary argument that "makes sense"). Indeed

Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it

El hecho de añadir a causa de hace que el hecho parezca más verosímil, y mucho más probable. El cáncer producido por el tabaco parece más probable que el cáncer sin una causa determinada; una causa indeterminada significa la inexistencia de una causa.

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events.

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now

No doubt as long as man and all other animals are viewed as independent creations, an effectual stop is put to our natural desire to investigate as far as possible the causes of Expression.

This distinction between correlation and causation is crucial to the proper interpretation of statistical results.

Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all.

When I see a picture like the 1861 cotton market, I ask myself, "What caused that? Why did that happen?" Then I try to figure it out. From that, you learn an enormous amount. In

There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirl of a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam.

The fundamental activity of medical science is to determine the ultimate causation of disease.

Man's chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.

Biases and blind spots exist in big data as much as they do in individual perceptions and experiences. Yet there is a problematic belief that bigger data is always better data and that correlation is as good as causation.

As for the actual causation of neuroses, apart from constitutional elements, whether somatic or psychic in nature, such feedback mechanisms as anticipatory anxiety seem to be a major pathogenic factor. A given symptom is responded to by a phobia, the phobia triggers the symptom, and the symptom, in turn, reinforces the phobia.

All science is a search for the conditions that determine phenomena.

There is female-on-male spouse abuse. There are women who hit their husbands. But there must have been something that caused that because otherwise it wouldn't have happened.