Cause and Effect

I am distrustful of cause and effect. I think nature is too. That is partly why our ability to disagree and interpret things differently is so powerful. There is consciousness in the sense of awareness of what is going on now. Then, there is consciousness in the sense of connecting those nows in a meaningful way.

Two big obstacles to those stories, are Spurious Correlations and Confounding Variables.

Spurious is like a combination of spew, furious and hilarious. It is the fake news of statistics. Two things appear connected or correlated. That is not because they are. It is because we are pattern seekers in an incredibly random world. Two things can dance together just because. We will add meaning even though it is not there.

Tyler Vigen collects these kind of amusing dances that point out that 'correlation does not equal causation'. The number of people who drowned by falling into a pool, is correlated with the number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in. 

A Confounding Variable is something that confuses everything. It may seem that we have figured out the cause of something, but there are other things involved. The 'outside influence' affects both the cause and effect. It is incredibly difficult to isolate something so that nothing else interferes. 

Food is a great example. Anyone wanting to eat healthily will get millions of competing theories. It is very hard to stop eating everything else, eat just a single ingredient, then observe its effect. Then repeat with each combination of two, etc.. Each of us is different. Instead, we come up with sweeping 'cause and effect' stories that we generalise to others because it worked for us. We think. Till it doesn't. Then sorry. The biggest Confounding Variable is the story we bring with us. The prejudice we already have that needs to be unwound to see clearly.

You can be distrustful of cause and effect, and still use the stories you learn. Just add more than a sprinkle of humility. The world is complicated and random. Everything is a pattern if you want it to be. We can thank our imaginations for that.