Voters Swayed By Candidates Who Share Their Looks 266
iandoh writes "Stanford researchers have found that voters are subconsciously swayed by candidates who share their facial features. In three experiments, researchers at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab worked with cheap, easy-to-use computer software to morph pictures of about 600 test subjects with photos of politicians. And they kept coming up with the same results: For the would-be voters who weren't very familiar with the candidates or in perfect lockstep with their positions or political parties, the facial similarity was enough to clinch their votes."
I can confirm from my work. (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a company, that is run mostly by women, but the thing is that all the women that work there, they ALL Look like clones. Or they get hired because they look like the owners, as to give them the comfort in what "looks familiar" or to the fact the women, mimic the looks ...no, they all just look so similar makes me thinks it is more common than we think.
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You work for Elite Model Management and all the women look like Adriana Lima, you lucky sob.
Not that weird (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course you'll trust someone which looks like they is from your family / closely related more than someone who's not.
Makes perfect sense and makes me wonder why some people decided that "correlationisnotcausation" was a valid tag for this story. Would be intresting to hear their theory about why this happens if it's not because of the similar looks ...
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They don't all happen to be related, do they?
Yep. I had a boss... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. I had a boss who had long hair and who had hired me for a customer service position back in the 90s when I had long hair. Every other woman she hired also had long hair. I thought the hair length was incidental until she got a short hair cut and started pressuring all of her employees to cut their hair. I transferred departments to get away from her nuisances.
Dress codes don't have much of a real impact on performance as long as employees don't take advantage and wear clothing that is not appropriate a
!pantyhose (Score:3, Interesting)
Our company had a very strict pantyhose rule when I first started here; one lady in accounting was actually sent home for wearing shoes with no hose - with a PANT SUIT. Not even a skirt. Just showing a bit of ankle. We only recently have been allowed to wear open-toed shoes in summer.
If you want happy workers, let them dress comfortably. Sheesh.
Re:Yep. I had a boss... (Score:5, Funny)
Mass confusion here! Doing the usual reading of comments under the assumption of a male writer (this is Slashdot, afterall) I wondered what female boss would hire a guy specifically for his long hair... it wasn't until I got to the comment about panty hose that I figured out you were a bank robber and not a computer scientist!
Re:I can confirm from my work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anybody who has a real job(or anybody who has read Cosmopolitan magazine) knows that every corporation has implicit and explicit dress codes. "Dress like your boss does" is a common saying for a reason.
Yeah, probably good advice in a lot of cases.
I am very selective about jobs I take. I do not wear suits and ties and I do not do Microsoft Windows. That limits, somewhat, the kind of jobs I find myself in, but I've never had a problem with dress codes[1].
It possibly also depends upon experience. Earlier in my career I made the promise that I would start wearing a tie to work if I was promoted and did so after the promotion for a long time. For whatever reason, my advancement after that was very fast.
It also depends upon the company. I was contracting for McDonnell Douglas in a division that got swallowed up by EDS in the early 1990s. The dress code (applied to manager types in our group only at first) was truly draconian. It not only specified things like the permissable range of shades of blue skirts that women were allowed to wear, it specified the distance that said skirts were allowed to stray away from the knee and tie colors/styles and a lot of other crap like that.
It was kind of summed up by a remark I heard from one of the EDS technical guys who had come in to assimilate us - "The customers say, hey, that guy may be a total idiot, but he sure is a sharp dresser!"
Take that for what you will.
[1] I've seen stricter enforcement of dress codes in weekend amateur tournament bowling clubs than I have experienced at work.
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3) Technical - Comfortable, nice looking clothes, probably collared shirt and khakis.
I prefer t-shirts, but whatever.
I will note for the record that I saw my boss**3 (3 management levels above me and I work for a huge company) wearing clothes about on those lines when he was visiting the area this week.
If you have to work under someone and deal with customers, you probably will have to be assimilated, because that's just better for business.
I would agree with that. Maybe that's why I prefer email as a primary contact point.
Otherwise, you only dress nice because it's comfortable and helps you fit in. : /
No. You dress nicely if you are single to impress the attractive [insert-your-preferred-gender]s around you in the workplace. As a male, a starched collar and a nice tie does go a long ways in that area ...
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1) Low level manual labor - whatever's comfortable. 3) Technical - Comfortable, nice looking clothes, probably collared shirt and khakis.
I work for a school district as a locksmith (which falls somewhere between 1 and 3), and our dress code is ridiculously lax. It's basically little more than 1) above, "work boots, long pants, no offensive writing/images on your shirt". I think we could do with a tighter code. The way some of my fellow employees dress, I swear that the reason they make us wear ID badges is so the schools don't think a homeless crackhead wandered on to campus.
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Gah... why does everyone try to lower the standard for communication or culture. You take the cussing, spitting broads, I'll take the considerate (calculating?) well-mannered women. I like being around people who try to improve their manner, speech and character.
Re:I can confirm from my work. (Score:5, Interesting)
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A new career beckons! (Score:5, Funny)
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Bush won because he can supposedly relate to joe sixpack. This seems pretty similar.
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Are we suggesting that Joe spends a couple hours at the track every day, rain or shine, or are we saying that he just drinks a lot?
Re:A new career beckons! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah I meant generally ignorant of the world he lives in, pretty stupid, probably can't stay awake during a meeting on the economy or science, and is no where near qualified to run a country.
Re:A new career beckons! (Score:5, Interesting)
And now you know... (Score:4, Funny)
...why Cowboy Neal gets all the votes in the slashdot polls.
how demoralizing... (Score:2)
On a more serious note, is this surprising to anyone?
Re:how demoralizing... (Score:5, Funny)
Before you get demoralized, have you seen Mrs. Kucinich?
Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard statistics from some sources as high as 97% of black voters will be voting for Obama, just google for some of it it's out there. Even if they're off and lets say it's only 85%, still.
If 85% of white people voted for McCain, it would be considered racist.
Just saying.
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I believe the parents was attempting to draw attention to the traditional affiliation of black voters and the democrat party.
Yes, I'd expect that a very substantial number of black people will vote for Obama. But a very substantial number of black people voted for Kerry(because he's a Democrat and that party's supposed policies appeal to the broad demographic of "black voters").
tl;dr The fact that many black voters are saying they're going to vote for the democrat candidate shouldn't be all that shocking.
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Are you suggesting that black people face exactly the same problems with the same toolset as whites or asians or east indians or, or...?
There's plenty of variation within each race(eg: from Bill Gates to some white-trash hick), but looking at aggregate demographics, whites and blacks are still different in numerous ways. Of course those differences will influence their political views.
I like to think that I care about the needs of people aside from me and those like me, but in moments of honest reflection
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So political party becomes a proxy for race,
It's more a proxy for economic situation. Poor people tend to vote for people who want to improve their situation, rich people tend to vote for people who want to improve their situation. It's just that the majority of blacks are relatively poor (or their parents were) and see more benefit from Democrats, whereas white people tend to dominate the demographics that benefit from Republican policies.
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>If 85% of white people voted for McCain, it would be considered racist.
And it would shock the authors of this study, as presumably far less than 85% of the population consists of Raisinettes. Me, I'm writing in Cthulhu, per the orders of a certain T-shirt I saw once.
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I've heard statistics from some sources as high as 97% of black voters will be voting for Obama, just google for some of it it's out there. Even if they're off and lets say it's only 85%, still.
If 85% of white people voted for McCain, it would be considered racist.
It would only be racist if they vote for him only because he's white. So why is black people voting for Obama different? Exactly because there's never been a black president yet. So far, the presidency has always been reserved for a white elite. People want to believe that skin colour has nothing to do with your ability to become president, and having a president with a different skin colour would be the ultimate proof of that.
Had I been allowed to vote, this would definitely be a factor for me (although I'
It just means blacks have got common sense (Score:2)
Blacks voting for Obama are mainly voting their interest, and Obama is an amazing candidate by many measures. If someone like Clarence Thomas were running for president do you think many blacks would be voting for him? Me neither.
Blacks in the US *have* to think pragmatically. They can't afford (or they act as if they can't afford, which I wish most folks would do) to elect officials who are going to play shenani
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Guess what, someone in another thread is complaining about the overuse of "correlation is not causation", and here you go with a fine example of correlation having nothing to do with causation. The black vote has always been for the democrats in the last decades, and this time the democrat candidate happens to be black (halfway at least).
Since 90% of the blacks are voting for the presidential ticket with no women, are you inferring that
Re:Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
What is that you were saying again?
Right, because WHITE (R) people don't like any BLACK people.
Could it be that more blacks aren't (R) because of the hatred spewed against those few black people who are (R)? The vile vitriol spewed against people like Clarance Thomas and Michael Steele is simply amazing.
Also, look at who the NAACP supports, and in cases where it is a white (D) vs a black (R), they go with the white (D) everytime. I guess it color only counts if you're a (D), huh?
So would Tina Fey vote for Sarah Palin? (Score:5, Funny)
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She has no choice. Sure, she's got a decent gig in her various projects, but if Palin's elected, Fey has a LOCK on employment for the next 4, probably 8, and even the possibility of 12-16 years.
That's nothing to sneeze at.
On the point of the original article: well duh.
"People prefer people that look like themselves" - news at 11. I'd thought that was obviously the root cause of everything from racism to the fact that most married people look like each other.
Junk science! (Score:4, Funny)
This research is totally bogus. I just like to vote for the ugly candidate.
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Yeah! And I just like to vote for whoever looks stupider!
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Pffft! That's nothing. *I* like to vote for whichever candidate looks like he might have some sort of multiple personality disorder. Makes things more interesting that way!
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Yeah! And I just like to vote for whoever looks stupider!
And I know from personal experience that handsome people are smarter.
Politicans (Score:5, Funny)
No wonder politicans are two-faced - they're trying to double their votes.
Obama (Score:5, Interesting)
I've wondered for a while if part of what makes white voters more likely to accept Obama as the first black president is the fact that, despite his dark skin color, he has very European facial features. Andrew Sullivan has recently been posting pictures of Obama's (white) grandfather, to whom the presidential candidate bears a striking resemblance.
Obviously, it's impossible to give a truly satisfying answer to such a counterfactual, but I can't help but suspect that if Obama had more stereotypically African features---you know what I mean---that he would not be in the position he is in now.
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I can't help but suspect that if Obama had more stereotypically African features---you know what I mean---that he would not be in the position he is in now.
Actually, I suspect the answer to his popularity lies somewhere in this paper http://www.pennypresslv.com/Obama's_Use_of_Hidden_Hypnosis_techniques_in_His_Speeches.pdf [pennypresslv.com]
I do not buy all of that, as I am not convinced Obama is his own man, but certainly he gives much different speech in impromptu sessions (all the "uh" hesitations, his own admission that he is not effective in 1-on-1 communications) versus prepared speeches and his own VP candidate has gone on record (twice!) as saying that once he gets into o
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As someone who finds Obama dangerously inexperienced and a socialist joke for a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, I must say this paper is worthless.
The giveaway is the opening fifteen pages where the author finds it necessary to defend his claims and to say how dangerous and illegal the claimed "techniques" are. A serious position paper or study will first present a position, then present supporting evidence, and then possibly present a defense against possible attacks. The effect that t
That's scary because... (Score:2, Funny)
...most slashdotters look kinda like Cheney.
Obama Is White (Score:5, Informative)
Barack Obama looks exactly like his grandfather, Stanley Dunham [edemocrats.org], except Barack's skin is darker and his hair curlier.
Obama is half "Black" and half "White". He's been called "Black" so many times, it's only fair to call him "White". Especially because he looks just like his White family.
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Exactly? No. Somewhat? Of course. He is biologically related. That's like saying that russian women tend to look russian. Of course they will. He is Mulatto, which is not white or black technically. However, double standards mean that people care more about the black side than regard both equally. Sad thing is the amount of racism in certain areas in the south may come out big time if Obama becomes president.
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Of course not "exactly". No two people, even identical twins at 10 minutes old, look "exactly" alike.
The point is that Obama and his grandfather resemble each other so much more closely than they differ, other than Obama's skin color, that they are very clearly more closely related than most any two White people. Yet Obama is designated as "other" by White people.
Yes, that one characteristic of his appearance has quite a lot of disproportionate power in people's affiliation with him, as the research this st
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Well no, I would say Obama is just as much like his grandfather as any white person is like any other completely random white person, sans heredity.
You're really making a comparison out of something I wouldn't really say is apples to apples.
Some African Americans are Mulatto to some degree. I'd say there's a point where people choose to identify the one way or the other because they need something to identify with. I would say it's far stretch to even say everyone is mulatto. Remember, the US is a melting p
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Isn't the black vote usually heavily democrat anyway? It was far more interesting to see the demographic split in the primaries, when he was running against a nearly identical white woman*. More telling was the way the split happened. At first there was only a little bt of a split, 60/40, but when the campaigns moved into the south, the demographic split ran 80/20 in at least one state (Mississippi I think).
*As opposed to the nearly identical white man with a different brand name.
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Barack Obama looks exactly like his grandfather, Stanley Dunham [edemocrats.org], except Barack's skin is darker and his hair curlier.
Are you sure that isn't Jason Biggs?
Obama is half "Black" and half "White". He's been called "Black" so many times, it's only fair to call him "White". Especially because he looks just like his White family.
I like to apply the redneck daughter test. If he were to date a redneck's daughter, that redneck would call him black, so, therefore, he's black.
Makes sense (Score:2)
Cross-racial recognition (Score:2)
Could you pick out of a line-up a visually foreign person you've only just met? For example, I'm of Indonesian descent, 3rd generation Canadian. I'm far better at distinguishing caucasians than they are at distinguishing any asians.
I can't imagine what middle-of-the-road Americans must inperpret from seeing the two candidates. A black man with white features, or an old geezer.
My first thought would be "what, they couldn't find any normal people to run for president?"
Along that same line, I have to ask, "
Palin shooting her own voters! (Score:2)
Since I guess she mistook her supporters for "deer in the headlights"...
And what does this mean in the real world? (Score:3, Insightful)
In order for the test to work (correct me if I'm wrong), the only factor that they would have been told is that they were voting for a politician in an experiment. When people have nothing else to make a decision on, they will generally try to pick something, no matter how superficial it may seem.
But when voting for someone in the real world, more factors come into play and this test doesn't say anything about how much of an influence this trait plays, which is just as important as the experiment itself if you want to find out what it means in real elections.
Obvious consequence: vote for yourself! (Score:2)
Obama/Biden? McCain/Palin? Nader? H. Ron Paul?
Fuck 'em.
Vote for yourself!
Plant dippy looking campaign signs on your front lawn with your name on it.
Oh, your name is not on the ballot? My tip: ANYTHING is possible with a Diebold voting machine!
I plan on becoming the next county dog catcher, myself.
Surprising! (Score:2)
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That explains my attitude (Score:2)
I'm not black, and I'm not ancient, and if you want to include VPs, I'm not female. None of them look like me, so they all suck!
Not a fan of my look-alike pol (Score:3, Funny)
I've been told I look like Sarah Palin, but I am not particularly fond of her. Sure as heck wouldn't vote for her. I'm going to be very careful when I buy new glasses not to get ones that enhance the resemblance.
Wrinkly versus non-wrinkly (Score:3, Interesting)
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Where does the correlation come from then? Unless you suggest that people who look the same ACTUALLY have the same political views.
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Interesting)
People tend to like people who are similar to themselves. The old saw "birds of a feather" bit actually rings true a fair amount of the time.
Of course, there's no guarantee that the person who looks vaguely similar to me actually DOES share my views, but if I have no other information to go with, then it's probably a better indicator of who to go with than a coin toss.
Genetics and life experience work together to shape our looks, and those two things also shape our attitudes and actions.
The best explanation is though that despite the great efforts we go through to try and train it out of people, all other things being equal they still prefer in-groups to out-groups. The root of this likely comes from things such as kin selection [wikipedia.org] and the generally tribal nature of early man.
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Where does the correlation come from then? Unless you suggest that people who look the same ACTUALLY have the same political views.
The correlationisnotcausation tag really winds me up because correlation DOES imply causation. If A and B are correlated then either A causes B, B causes A, or C causes both A and B (or it's a chance finding but that's what p-values are for). So once you have a correlation its just a case of working out which causal relationship is true. I'll leave this specific case as an exercise for the reader.
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Because it is very simplistic.
C -> D
D -> F
D -> E
E -> G
G -> A
F -> B
In this relationship C -> A and C -> B
But in order to pinpoint C, you have to work back from A and B via E,F and D. Verifying a C is relatively easy. Finding C can be very nasty. And if there are loops involved it can be a lot nastier.
Sure, correlation implies causation. But which one?
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But in order to pinpoint C, you have to work back from A and B via E,F and D. Verifying a C is relatively easy. Finding C can be very nasty. And if there are loops involved it can be a lot nastier.
Sure, correlation implies causation. But which one?
You're right of course, but you don't have to understand the complete chain to discover C. It helps to think it through obviously, but you can easily try adjusting for things (in this case like demographic factors, genetics, etc) until you hit one that accounts for the association, and then work forwards to try to work out why, although understanding why (ie knowing D,E,F) is not often necessary, (for example if C is genetic).
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Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Informative)
To all the people tagging this "correlation is not causation," do you even know what you're talking about? This was a randomized experiment.
I'm not saying this is a perfect study -- there might be plenty of other things wrong with it. But the phrase "correlation is not causation" has an actual meaning. It is not just a synonym for "I had a kneejerk reaction to dislike this study but I can't say why."
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Insightful)
Undecided Voters Swayed by Candidates Who Share Their Looks
But then,
Hey -- There's your idea for a social experiment!
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That may be happening because the headline's misleading (as usual)
YAIMSH [slashdot.org]
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No. There are people who will vote for their party, even if they put a horse's ass up for election. No "decision" is made.
I can give you an example, but George Bush probably feels bad enough about now, what with the country practically a flaming ruin as he prepares to leave office. But, I suppose there are some that look at the results of his presidency and say "Mission Accomplished".
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been shown that people are more attracted to people with similar facial features when choosing mates, it makes some sense that people would feel better about choosing a leader with similar facial features for the same biological reasons.
Now I'm not saying that this hypothesis is clearly true, just that we don't have to jump all over it.
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Funny)
Come to think of it, that might explain why there's always a "CowboyNeal" option in the polls...
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Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it's true that correlation does not always equal causation, but causation does tend to result in correlation.
err. it's a bit more than "tend to result in"
If causation, then correlation.
or equivalently...
If no correlation, than no causation.
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It is statistically possible to take an arbitrarily large group of people and have them flip a coint an arbitrarily large number of times and come up with a result where every man flips all heads and every woman flips all tails.
It's incredibly unlikely, but not impossible.
Assuming you don't already know that the odds of any given flip of the coin are 50/50, you could draw a correlation betw
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, causality is something that a lot of very smart statisticians do spend a lot of time studying. It's not inconceivable that in the future people will be able to make concrete statistical statements about causality with confidence intervals and the works. What will the mantra be then?
Anyway, correlation's not *that* good of a measure of (interesting and nonlinear) dependence between (non-Gaussian) variables anyway. Mutual information is the ticket.
Ok, done with my rant.
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For a starter: Path Analysis (as of 1918)
link [wikipedia.org]
CC.
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And rightly so.
Most science stories posted to Slashdot are junk science studies which use the law of large numbers and fuzzy statistics to promote the most dubious of arguments under the pretence of scientific inquiry. Many studies take correlation coefficients of 0.5 to be "significant". What a joke. How long is the scientific community going to continue to call this rigour?
Re:Mark this article (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdotters are right to point out the Correlation is not, and never will be causation. Never, never, never, never, never. If you want to show causation, then you must have a model and you must subject it to experiment. Experiment! Not statistical mumbo-jumbo.
I think you are wrong. Epidemiology and observational science have given up a lot without the need for experimentation (we know smoking causes lung cancer, though this has never been directly established through an experiment, since it would be massively unethical). Correlation does imply causation, as I've pointed out in an earlier comment, the hard part is working out what the causal relationships are (ie A->B, B->A or C->A and C->B, these are the ONLY explanations for statistically significant correlation).
The reverse possibility B->A here is nonsense, because voting patterns cannot affect your looks, and the way this study was conducted (you can read the details) pretty well rules out the confounding factor 'C', leaving us with A->B as the only plausible explanation.
I'd like to see you try to refute this (without resorting to insults or rhetoric), particularly if you can think of a way for variables to be correlated without some form of causal relationship as I've described.
Re:Saturn and S&P Correlated (Score:4, Insightful)
OK first thanks for taking me seriously. I am actually quite flattered that there is now a webpage dedicated to describing how much of an idiot I am.
I also hope you have the good grace to post my rebuttal to both your arguments, first that science cannot be conducted without experiments, and second that correlation does not equal causation. You have my permission to publish this so long as you do so in its entirity.
I'm going to give you a short CV, just so you know (not sure it's relevant but anyway). I have a degree in mathematics, a masters degree in mathematical statistics, a PhD in evolutionary biology (my thesis topic was along the lines of 'what can we infer from comparisons of gene orders of extant species') and I've worked for four years as an epidemiologist on a observational study of health and cognition. It's fair to say that over the past ten years I've thought about the ideas of correlation, causation, and inference for a living. If I had any doubt that what I was doing was fundementally flawed from a scientific point of view I wouldn't do it.
Regarding your Saturn example, well you've managed to find two things that increase with time, but are quite clearly unrelated in every other regard. You have calculated their correlation as 0.88, suggested that I would draw the conclusion that one causes the other, which is plainly absurd, therefore my argument that correlation implies causation is incorrect.
There are two ways I will respond.
The most obvious is that you did not read my argument. I claimed A->B, OR B->A, OR C->A and C->B. Clearly here we have a correlation, so one of these must be true. A->B and B ->A are both obviously silly, so we are left with C->A and C->B. Well what could 'C' be? Here it helps that you've not plotted A vs B as would be traditional to illustrate a correlation, but you've helpfully plotted A and B against a third factor, 'time'. In this case C=time, the passing of time has caused the stock market to increase and has caused Saturn to do whatever it did (I'm not an astronomer). If you do a regression of A vs B adjusting for time I'd be pretty sure you'll see the correlation would be gone.
Second, (and this is a more minor subtle complaint) there is the issue of statistical significance. I don't know but I'd bet the correlation you showed does not hold much outside of the small window you've showed it, and that you've selected this particular example to illustrate your point. If you give me any two time series I could probably find a small window in which they are both increasing, so that correlation is statistically meaningless because of multiple testing issues (note I qualified my initial claim with the words 'statistically significant')
Next, I absolutely agree with you that experimentation is the gold standard of scientific research. I cannot accept however that it is the only way to draw conclusions. Much of science cannot be tested experimentally because it would be impractical, unethical (as with most of the work I do) or just plain silly. My earlier example 'lung cancer is caused by smoking' is a good example of a purely observation finding that was totally unexpected at the time and was found simply on the basis of observing the smoking patterns of people in lung cancer wards compared with others. The big prospective studies came much later, and experiments will never be done, yet I'm sure you would accept this finding as true.
I also agree with you that most science posted on Slashdot is rubbish, for a variety of reasons, mostly because science progresses in very small increments, and so on its own no paper is ever really newsworthy, and has to have its significance bloated out of all proportion to get into the news (ie they fail the 'so what' test). However faulty causation is not often the culprit, because most scientists are very good at adjusting for potential confounders in their relationships (and journals are very go
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It does, but there are innumerable junk studies out there that do nothing but grab some handy statistics and pull bullshit conclusions out of the air. The news media is only too happy to uncritically report on them as well, exposing an unsuspecting public to ridiculously conclusions that may harm rather than help them. Skepticism is fully warranted.
I would go so far as to suggest a change of la
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The people that use that tag almost never know what they're talking about. (And no, dipshits, the fact that there's a strong correlation between not knowing what you're talking about and using that tag does not imply using the tag is caused by it, and neither is it in any way "insightful" to point that out.)
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It drives me nuts that Slashdotters always bring up "correlation does not imply causation" any time any sort of experiment is mentioned even if no one is even trying to assert a causative relationship.
"Correlation does not imply causation" seems to be one of those ideas that a lot of people seem to somehow be proud of knowing and as such try to apply even when they aren't needed. Other examples of these sorts of ideas on Slashdot are the term "prior art" and car analogies.
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Interesting)
While correlation does not prove causation, it sure does imply causation. It's probably about as close to the definition of imply that I can come up with. The only way I can see the phrase making sense is to use the logic definition of suggest as a logically necessary consequence. Then the original usage may have held a meaning of While causation implies correlation, correlation does not imply causation, basically saying if there is causation, then correlation will follow. So finding correlations is extremely useful, but picking out the root cause of the correlation can be quite difficult, especially when there are multiple factors in play all feeding back on each other.
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While correlation does not prove causation, it sure does imply causation.
More simply, causation causes correlation. If you don't have correlation, then you can't claim causation.
More to the point, causation is highly correlated with correlation (rho=0.977 [netspace.net.au]).
Problems arise when people claim that correlation causes causation. Since causation is a boolean variable while correlation is real-valued, with suitable rounding, then yes, it's true.
It's all very simple really.
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Yes, like having to cope with spectacles causes you to be more intelligent.
CC.
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Actually, some people on Slashdot seem to take it as a handy way to refute results they don't like, and also to appear smart.
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It's like when they claim that applying the brakes of a car make it go slower or stop. However, this can not be taken to mean that any car that goes slower has its brakes applied. Some cars also slow down or stop because they ran out of fuel, the engine cut out, they ran into a tree, or a multitude of other reasons. (However, it is still true for the vast majority of cases where the car slows down or stops, the brakes where used by the driver.)
And I surely hope that this has not been thought of by someone
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Funny)
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The one that sounds like them.
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"Correlation is not causation" is the new "FUD" - it's something people can yell when they dislike something but can't figure out how to refute it, without ever really understanding that the term has an actual, specific meaning.
Sure you are ... "Come Out" (Score:2)
I think you will feel a lot better, when you explain that you are African-American to your parents. They will be more accepting than you expect.
Especially your mother.
Your father might give her some dirty looks for a while.
Pity poor me: I favor Obama, but also think that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is doing a rather fine job. So I have to tell my mother that, not only that I am African-American, but that her son is really a daughter as well!
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the actual voting public for most decisions would diminish to those who care about the issue.
This might be a good idea, but it is not foolproof, because this is pretty much how lobbying works today: Organizations that care deeply about an issue -- whether it be corn ethanol, bridges in Alaska, representation of a particular ethnic group, or something else -- are the ones who dedicate resources (in the case of online voting, this would be time) to making sure that they get their way. The general public does not. The basic issue is the problem of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits. That said,