This is a huge one for me. I often half-jokingly like to expand it to "Correlation almost never implies cause" because of how often i feel it's abused.
Constructing a truly bulletproof empirical study is actually really really hard. The number of possible variables wherein external causation can be hiding is often prohibitively huge, and even if one can miraculously find them all, finding a population that diversifies over all of them to allow for statistically significant results is a monumental task in and of itself.
Scientific efforts are absolutely important, and need to continue, and need to be very carefully conducted and documented for reasons like this. And, in the end, we must also remember that they are exactly that: efforts. I think the cases where a single empirical study can pop out and truly make a significant dent in human understanding are few and far between. Moreso, it's the slow and gradual contribution that these things make over time that progresses the state of our awareness along. While it's admittedly very inconvenient, i think a healthy outlook for us to keep as a very general baseline is that the progression of knowledge from prospective hypothesis to accepted fact requires something on the order of decades. There are certainly wide variances/exceptions to this, but i believe we're best off judging things very conservatively as a rule of thumb.
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"Correlation does not imply cause."
Date: 2007-02-07 05:58 pm (UTC)Constructing a truly bulletproof empirical study is actually really really hard. The number of possible variables wherein external causation can be hiding is often prohibitively huge, and even if one can miraculously find them all, finding a population that diversifies over all of them to allow for statistically significant results is a monumental task in and of itself.
Scientific efforts are absolutely important, and need to continue, and need to be very carefully conducted and documented for reasons like this. And, in the end, we must also remember that they are exactly that: efforts. I think the cases where a single empirical study can pop out and truly make a significant dent in human understanding are few and far between. Moreso, it's the slow and gradual contribution that these things make over time that progresses the state of our awareness along. While it's admittedly very inconvenient, i think a healthy outlook for us to keep as a very general baseline is that the progression of knowledge from prospective hypothesis to accepted fact requires something on the order of decades. There are certainly wide variances/exceptions to this, but i believe we're best off judging things very conservatively as a rule of thumb.