On Thursday 30 Oct 2008 4:53:53 am Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: > classic confusion > between causality and correlation. and not even good correlation,
I really don't know about the US but among Indians in India this is rampant. It is a huge problem in medical practice because there are a large number of health related superstitions that are quoted by almost any one and none of these superstitions have any real bearing on cause and effect Charles' spinning on bed example reminded me of a similar example I tell my patients about trying to illustrate the disconnect between cause and effect in some cases. I tell them that I nornally have my pillow on the North end of my bed. One night I placed my pillow on the South end of the bed and that night there was a huge earthquake in India that killed tens of thousands of people. Ever since then I have been afraid to place my pillow on the Southern end. Most patients understand the reasoning here but come superstitions run too deep to be rmoved by science and logic. Similar absurd conclusions are reached in politics and as long as there is visible "proof" to support a contention. Wotzisname Thickeray's attacks on North Indians in Mumbai seem to fall into this category. Who is going to inform the security apparatus on the US when they seem to be succeeding in prevenying terror? In fact what we don't know may be even more significant here. When a security organization is paranoid enough it keeps getting "leads" that are followed up and every now and again some plot or other is "busted". I doubt if we hear about all of these "plots". But each one of them is proof of the shampoo bottle strategy to the people who are doing them. One has to marvel at the kind of fight put up by people like Galileo or Semmelweiss (in medicine) fighting against easy conclusions that are reached regarding causality. It is so difficult to "prove" that checking shampoo bottles is useless as long as it seems to be working. This goes on and on. After World War 2 it was "proved" that the thousand bomber raids over Germany were not really doing what they were intended to do. Ha! I love that. But imagine if someone had tried to "prove" that they were ineffective during World War 2? We are seeing a parallel of the same ancient attitudes today. shiv
