{"id":74671,"date":"2020-07-16T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-16T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=74671"},"modified":"2022-11-11T11:19:19","modified_gmt":"2022-11-11T17:19:19","slug":"if-its-a-spurious-correlation-it-leads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=74671","title":{"rendered":"If It&#8217;s A Spurious Correlation, It Leads"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Correlation doesn&#8217;t equal causation.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Every kid with a decent junior high science teacher knew that by, well, the end of junior high. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Millennials didn&#8217;t have good science teachers.  Seriously &#8211; how did medical schools find students, much less graduate doctors, over this past 15 years?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I digress.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It also seems to be what passes for &#8220;Journalism&#8221; lately. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To wit &#8211; according to the WaPo, a spike in violent urban crime over the past three months &#8220;followed&#8221; the greatest wave in history of people&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Standing in line, sometimes for hours<\/li><li>Digging through diminished stock<\/li><li>Taking a federal background check (sometimes, as in Minnesota, twice) and often jumping through other permitting hoops<\/li><li>Buying a gun legally<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/business\/2020\/07\/15\/gun-sales-jump-protests-coronavirus\/?utm_campaign=wp_main&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter\">&#8220;led to&#8221; a spike in violent crime<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not dumb enough for you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>\u201cWe find that states where individuals are more likely to search for racial epithets experienced larger increases in June firearm sales,\u201d they wrote, \u201ceven after adjusting for the personal security concerns that likely generated the March spikes in gun sales.\u201d This is a new development: Running the same analysis on previous spikes in gun-buying yielded no correlation between racial animus and purchasing behavior.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>No, it&#8217;s not the Babylon Bee.   <a href=\"http:\/\/tylervigen.com\/spurious-correlations\">But it&#8217;s pretty damn close<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Question for the &#8220;reporters&#8221; involved:   why are we so sure it&#8217;s not the other way around &#8211; that the crime wave didn&#8217;t cause the surge?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The death rate for media credibility is way ahead of the one for Covid. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Correlation doesn&#8217;t equal causation. Every kid with a decent junior high science teacher knew that by, well, the end of junior high. But Millennials didn&#8217;t have good science teachers. Seriously &#8211; how did medical schools find students, much less graduate doctors, over this past 15 years? But I digress. It also seems to be what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[419,453,130,377,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2020-riots","category-ch-ch-changes-generational-politics","category-tc-media-bias","category-the-second-civil-war","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74671"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74673,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74671\/revisions\/74673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}