Something happens and then because of that another thing happens. Cause creates Effect. This is a simple model, in reality things get muddled and complicated. Everything is linked to everything, you cannot pull one string and hope to see another string getting pulled as an effect. It is more like a web or a net string being pulled and an entire net getting ruffled due to it.
All the 'scientific' experiments done and made to look simplistic and designed to catch eye balls in media have a need to get rid of all complications and doubts. Hence we get cause and effect like - kids around books are smarter. Coffee drinking is good for your health. 1 glass of wine everyday is great. 3 glasses are bad. Exposure to sunlight makes people happy. If you live near water you are more likely to survive cancer. If you watch TV 'n' number of hours then you are dumb. If you watch certain TV show you are smart. In all these examples you can swap cause and effect and it won't matter. Obviously I made up these headlines but they might as well be true. Is it that simple? obviously not, because cause and effect are not singularly defined no matter how controlled you do an experiment. I am not doubting the process of experimentation but being human you do put in ambiguities in the process especially when you are trying to treat behavior and life as dumb machines. The controlled experiments and gleaning data out of life is difficult and does not always translate when you try to duplicate it back.
Well this is not the point of this blog. The point is 'behavioral'. People in their lives browse through 100s of these studies and even if you are not a habitual browser or reader you will hear people and friends off loading their new found obsessions to you. What happens in this dilution of data from source to consumer and the need for simplification is that we start swapping 'Effect' and 'Cause'. We start believing the cause causes effect and hence Effect causes cause. This makes us run in circles in our lives trying to catch the effect. If I heard Kids around books grow up to be smarter. Kid getting smart is the effect, or is it? Maybe it is the cause and effect is that these kids live around books. Or you can interpret it as - If some smart kids grew around books that does not mean a kid serving tea in a library will grow up smarter. Similarly you can think up any data on schools. There are schools with great results, if you send your kid to XYZ school the kid will become smart. Kid getting smart is an effect... or is it? Walmart is in shady areas.. or shady area is near walmart? If smart people watch a certain show, that does not mean watching a certain show will make you smart. Now I am sure people can dig up data supporting these very examples either way (if these examples are real :)) but the point is to look at it in a broader way.
Cause and effect can be swapped or not. So cause and effect are not very clear. Sometimes cause looks like an effect and vice versa. Media has a compulsion of attracting eye balls, PhD and masters students have a compulsion of working on a research to get a degree and Professors and corporations have a compulsion of researching the thread (in the web/net) that makes sense of their agenda. If you are reading these cause and effect simplistic theories for fun, so you can bring it up during a fun discussion, that is good usage of data. If the data is going to linger in your head and make you change the way you live, you owe it to yourself to make sure you question the research and don't follow your religion blindly (AKA Science).
Hey Vikrant: Great Blog. This one is right up there in terms of insight with the earlier one on Junk Data (my favorite). I think on the schools part ... any school will have some genuis type characters. Did that school make that happen? No probably not. It is up to the young person to make something out of the school environment. If it is a little more difficult, the less inclined won't do it. That is probably the difference that people unfortunately extend to mean that anyone at one of the lesser schools will suffer, and those at the "Best" schools will kick butt. Or whatever you want ... not a nice campus, or too many students to teachers, or not a school that is well known so there is no motivation to do much. Also there are so many unfinished theories on cause-effect that any relationship can be claimed. You have to judge it for yourself. But sometimes you need to defer to the "level of human understanding" such as Climate Change. If no useful scientific papers were accepted saying it's not happening, but <1000 journal publications say it is a fact, what to do? That is when you have to concede that epistomologically, it seems to be happening. Sketchy claims ... well take them for exactly that and beware of them too. Someone told me pepper has been linked to cancer. I don't lose sleep over this one.
ReplyDeleteThanks Dan. With Climate change the difference it is not completely a human study so it becomes more accurate. it is like you go to 100 places on earth and see the ball always comes down and you make a law of gravitation. But if you slap 100 people and see the reaction and then try to judge how a human will react and then try to make a law of slapping.. it will not be the same as gravitation :)
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