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Influence and causality: castration doesn't make you live longer

inference.vc · 668 words · saved by 1 readers

Hopefully obvious to most readers, but in my experience many people tend to still confuse the following two statements: "whenever A holds, B is more likely to hold" and "A causes B". They are not the same. The first statement expresses statistical dependence, the second causal

January 18, 2012 Hopefully obvious to most readers, but in my experience many people tend to still confuse the following two statements: "whenever A holds, B is more likely to hold" and "A causes B". They are not the same. The first statement expresses statistical dependence, the second causal influence. Let me demonstrate this distinction with the following example: if you look at statistics, you may observe, that "people who do not have testicles live longer". Clearly, this doesn't imply that if you do have testicles then you should cut them off to live longer. (I mean, really, please…

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