Misconceptions Footnote †: Randomness and Feedback
Footnote to the main video here: https://youtu.be/HUti6vGctQM Feedback loops and spurious correlations! REFERENCES: Spurious correlations: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations...
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Ok, correlations and causation footnotes: In the main video I said that when you finda correlation, it’s natural to look for explanations or causes of it. This is called Reichenbach's Principle.But sometimes correlations occur just by chance, like those on the website “spurious correlations”which selectively cherry-picks data points from different stats that randomly happento line up.As an example of a chance correlation, if I flip two coins enough times, eventuallythere’ll be a long string of matching heads or tails just by chance, and if I just cherrypickthose flips I can make it look like the coins are super correlated.But when an apparent correlation is actually random in origin (like in this case), thenif you keep looking at larger and larger samples, ...
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Ok, correlations and causation footnotes: In the main video I said that when you finda correlation, it’s natural to look for explanations or causes of it. This is called Reichenbach's Principle.But sometimes correlations occur just by chance, like those on the website “spurious correlations”which selectively cherry-picks data points from different stats that randomly happento line up.As an example of a chance correlation, if I flip two coins enough times, eventuallythere’ll be a long string of matching heads or tails just by chance, and if I just cherrypickthose flips I can make it look like the coins are super correlated.But when an apparent correlation is actually random in origin (like in this case), thenif you keep looking at larger and larger samples, ...
