But if 20 billion guys have facial hair and only those that ate pizza got the result would you see the connection?
I would continue to see the correlation between Saturday pizza and being a great guy. I don't care how many guys had facial hair or ate pizza on Saturdays. Correlation isn't causation. Unless you isolate that variable and rule out the rest, you can't even begin to think about causation. So it is with health care systems. There are myriad variables. You just can't pick your favorite and claim it to be cause. Well, I suppose you can claim it, but your claim wouldn't be valid.
In the last couple of weeks there have been reports of a study where rats were fed junk food to see if there was any addictive effect. The rats were fed bacon, sausage, cheesecake, pound cake, frosting and chocolate. The study demonstrated that they ate that diet compulsively.
Now, the reporting of that study has widely asserted that the study demonstrated that fat is addictive. But the study didn't isolate the fat variable so that claim isn't valid. It could have been the fat. Or it could have been the sugar. Or a combination of the two. Or it could have been the nitrites in the bacon and sausage or the salt in everything or the lactose in the cheese. There is no way to know because those variables were all mushed together in the rat food. But most people don't have the wherewithal, be it background or cognitive skills or attentiveness, to recognize that so they jump at their favorite bugaboo, which is fat, which they were already predisposed to believe.
That's the same thing that many folks who are enamored of the Euros react. They want single payer or universal coverage or whatever and so they attribute any positive results achieved by them to their favorite factor. Well, is it single payer that makes the difference? Is it universal coverage? Is it a combination of the two? Or is it something else entirely? There are all sorts of possibilities. I don't know which one or ones are causal and you don't either. You just think that you do.
What's the connection between Easter Sunday and Jesus?
Easter Sunday is the day Christians celebrate Jesus rising from the dead. What does that have to do with interpreting correlations? |
