My favourite argument is that;
The amount of people buying ice creams and the amount of people drowning also looks like curves that follow each other.
But less ices creams will not make less people drown. They both go up because of good weather conditions. They do not influence each other.
I do believe murders also positively correlate with ice cream sales.
I remember asking my first stats teacher. Something like
“So sometimes it’s obvious that there is a 3rd reason why two things are strongly correlated so we know it’s absurd to assume that one causes the other. But what about when it’s not so easy to tell?. When many people believe one does cause the other. ? (Even in scientific literature). How do we know for sure what is actually causal related and what just looks related?”.
Short answer. More research. And if possible. Controlled experiment using the sciencetific method. Not always possible.
–
She then went on to explain the research on video game violence and behavior violence in kids who play such games.
This is where things get complicated.
Violent kids (behavioral traits) seem to be encouraged to be more physically violent by engaging with violent games/media.
But kids who aren’t already aggressive or violent don’t get that effect.
Kids with violent tendencies are more attracted to violent video games and play them more.
Many behavior and social problems are like this.
One type of engagement increases a specific type of behavior that further increases the engagement that perpetuates the behavior.
Things become cycles.
For instance. Depression and anxiety may encourage people to self medicate with recreational drugs.
Recreational drugs have long term effects, many of which are increases in anxiety and depression. Which then encourages the person even more to seek out drugs to cope.
Studying phenomena in the world that can’t be investigated with controlled lab experiments is actually very complex and they often have to gather a lot more data and use more sophisticated statistics.
The historical version of this was the ww2 airplane patch job stats, where american bombers returning after getting hit were hit in specific areas and the statistician had to explain that those who returned despite that damage meant those were not the places to reinforce but the other areas of the plane makeing it more survivable, or more recently how Santa Monica CA almost removed crosswalks because that was where the highest pedestrian mortally rates were. In both those cases the people making the assumptions missed the bigger picture, for the planes that those who got hit in more sensitive spots got downed and for pedestrians getting killed at crosswalks that was because that is where pedestrians cross the street most of the time, almost leading to more deaths.
Teaching students to not conflate correlation with causation by pointing out absurd assumptions of causality from real correlations.
My favourite argument is that; The amount of people buying ice creams and the amount of people drowning also looks like curves that follow each other. But less ices creams will not make less people drown. They both go up because of good weather conditions. They do not influence each other.
I do believe murders also positively correlate with ice cream sales.
I remember asking my first stats teacher. Something like
“So sometimes it’s obvious that there is a 3rd reason why two things are strongly correlated so we know it’s absurd to assume that one causes the other. But what about when it’s not so easy to tell?. When many people believe one does cause the other. ? (Even in scientific literature). How do we know for sure what is actually causal related and what just looks related?”.
Short answer. More research. And if possible. Controlled experiment using the sciencetific method. Not always possible.
–
She then went on to explain the research on video game violence and behavior violence in kids who play such games.
This is where things get complicated.
Violent kids (behavioral traits) seem to be encouraged to be more physically violent by engaging with violent games/media.
But kids who aren’t already aggressive or violent don’t get that effect.
Kids with violent tendencies are more attracted to violent video games and play them more.
Many behavior and social problems are like this.
One type of engagement increases a specific type of behavior that further increases the engagement that perpetuates the behavior.
Things become cycles.
For instance. Depression and anxiety may encourage people to self medicate with recreational drugs. Recreational drugs have long term effects, many of which are increases in anxiety and depression. Which then encourages the person even more to seek out drugs to cope.
Studying phenomena in the world that can’t be investigated with controlled lab experiments is actually very complex and they often have to gather a lot more data and use more sophisticated statistics.
The historical version of this was the ww2 airplane patch job stats, where american bombers returning after getting hit were hit in specific areas and the statistician had to explain that those who returned despite that damage meant those were not the places to reinforce but the other areas of the plane makeing it more survivable, or more recently how Santa Monica CA almost removed crosswalks because that was where the highest pedestrian mortally rates were. In both those cases the people making the assumptions missed the bigger picture, for the planes that those who got hit in more sensitive spots got downed and for pedestrians getting killed at crosswalks that was because that is where pedestrians cross the street most of the time, almost leading to more deaths.