>Today, if there's correlation, unless it's clearly spurious/etc, and unless somebody has a better idea, I tell the product/eng team to push hard on it and don't even mention correlation vs causation.
Because it's actually a stupid thing to say. Correlation does not conclusively prove causation would be better. It certainly gives a sensible place to look.
Except that's not right. It may be. In fact persuing correlations is how we do science. At some point we gain enough confidence in the correlations that we call it causation.
I view 'imply' as 'suggest' and 'prove' is 'this is a fact'. Correlation does in fact imply causation (which is why correlations are investigated). It just doesn't prove the causation. It may be that the two things you're looking at are both related to some other cause (e.g. ice cream sales and murders increase in summer, supposedly. This does not mean ice cream sales has a direct relation to murder but they probably both have a relation to outside tempature), it may even be pure coincidence. But if you see a correlation you see a place to begin your investigations.
I'm not going to suggest that 'imply' is clearer/less clear, but they both mean what you think 'prove' does. To quote a bunch of dictionaries, the phrase is using 'imply' to mean:
'to involve something or make it necessary'
'to have as a necessary consequence'
'to involve something as a logical consequence'
Thus XKCD's extension of the phrase to `Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.` -- which is essentially what you're getting at.
What reliable resources would those be? Poorly defined, crap studies done by people who've never had children and the study was never independantly reproduced by anyone?
In the beginning, pain is the only means of communication (although we didn't actually spank, a little tug on the side burns did the trick). In my experience, once a child is old enough to understand time-based punishment (e.g. you don't get to watch TV tomorrow) a little and what it will mean, that becomes more effective.
Posts like this seem so dishonest. The entire point of shilling would be hiding the fact that your shilling (otherwise you'd buy an ad), so of course we don't have deep documentation of exactly who is shilling when, where, how much they're paid, etc.
What we do have is the knowledge of companies/groups dedicated to "influencing online opinion" (e.g. Correct the record, Share Blue, etc.). They don't advertise what they're doing but there somewhere doing influencing. Seems reasonable that they'd be on the biggest social sites doing their work.
What I've personally seen as very obvious shilling is GMO related topics on reddit (regardless of where you stand on the issue). You can be on the most obscure sub you can find, and if anyone says something critical about GMO products there will be a rebutal post within a short time always using the exact same arguments, exact same articles, terminology, etc. When new variations of the defense are developed they are instantly deployed site wide. This is for sure an organized group of people. Are they paid for it? I'm not sure, but for the effort they put in I hope they don't do it for free.
If I had infinite time, it would be intesting to do some deep data analysis on the posts on reddit and try to figure out how many are coordinated.
People don't need to be part of a secret organization to use the same arguments, sources, and terminology. A common cause or ideology will suffice.
I'm sure shill-theorists are not puppets of a secret cabal, for example, despite them all using the same unsourced anecdotes and unfalsifiable theories in their attempts to expose the truth about shilling.
I get that impression from almost everything I've read about Musk over the last 15 years. He absolutely does not fit into that bucket. Bezos is also not in the Jobs / Ellison group in regards to behavior. Bezos is a difficult boss, he's not a terror like Jobs & Ellison, he isn't known for attacking people, belitting people, throwing epic temper tantrums, threatening people, etc - much less doing the borderline criminal things that Ellison has (such as hiring PIs to dig through Bill Gates & Microsoft's garbage).
With Jobs and Ellison there are endless examples of them behaving as assholes toward normal people. What are the examples with Musk? He overwhelmingly seems to treat most people extremely well by comparison. The worst I've seen about him is that he pressurizes the work environment, that he's hard charging, although it certainly doesn't appear to be anything like Apple or Oracle under Jobs / Ellison. I don't believe you can build Tesla & SpaceX without anything less than the approach Musk has used.
Are you seriously trying to claim Snopes isn't biased? I would say that's the more outrageous claim here. If Snopes is absent of any bias, what is their methodology by which they achieve that? Here is someone [1] who tried to find out and could not.
And as far as bias, a quora post [2] seems to give the impression that Snopes was heavily favoring Hillary Clinton through the campaing.
So I'd like to turn this around: could those that believe Snopes is not biased give some kind of citation?
They weren't voting between Trump and no one. The alternative was Hillary Clinton. For a conservative christian you'll have a hard time finding someone they'd be more scared of having as president.
Ugh. Is what happened so very difficult to understand? Chistians were faced with voting for someone they were generally not comfortable with vs. someone believed to be truly evil. Her husband votoed a bill to ban so named "partial birth abortion" and Hillary expressed support for late term abortions.
If you could get over your contempt for people who see things differently than you do and actually talk with some of them you might find that a lot of people were voting against Hillary instead of for Trump.
> Asked by a reporter today what kind of language he could support in a revived bill, Mr. Clinton said he had originally planned to sign the earlier one.
> ''The problem is,'' he said, ''there are a few hundred women every year who have personally agonizing situations where their children are born or are about to be born with terrible deformities, which will cause them to die either just before, during or just after childbirth. And these women, among other things, cannot preserve the ability to have further children unless the enormity -- the enormous size of the baby's head is reduced before being extracted from their bodies.
> ''You know, Hillary and I, we only had one child. And I just cannot look at a woman who's in a situation where the baby she is bearing, against all her wishes and prayers, is going to die anyway, and tell her that I'm signing a law which will prevent her from ever having another child.''
Clearly a monster of pure evil. And his wife too.
Whereas her opponent supported torture, dehumanized immigrants every chance he got, has 5 children with 3 different women, bragged about cheating and sexual assault, lied as easy as breathing. Admittedly after the election, but supported a pedophile, although he joked about dating his daughter years before.
I fully stand by exactly what I originally posted. As a raised pentecostal Christian, if that should matter at all.
That's not fair. Everyone had the option of voting so nothing is forced on anyone. If you don't like what the people who actually voted picked, then try voting next time.
Everyone had the option of voting so nothing is forced on anyone
I don't follow. Forcing things on a set of people who wanted something else is exactly how it works, and will still work that way with 100% participation in the vote. When two wolves vote to eat the lamb for dinner, the lamb having voted not to be dinner doesn't make it any less forced on the lamb.
Funny enough, the creator of Perl's previously well known accomplishment was winning these contests pretty much any time he cared to join. Take that as you will.
Because it's actually a stupid thing to say. Correlation does not conclusively prove causation would be better. It certainly gives a sensible place to look.