Mobile phone masts linked to mysterious spikes in births

reply to post by The Revenant


THE CONCLUSION of the exercise. For anyone still interested.

My article was actually explaining how I was using this as an example of correlation where there is no causality, and I had put it out as a press release to see whether media outlets would jump to the incorrect conclusion that mobile phone radiation causes pregnancies.

As it turned out, I did not need to look to other media outlets for evidence that people are willing to jump to a specious correlation-based conclusion; I merely needed to scroll down to the comments beneath my article. There were the expected people who clearly did not actually read what I wrote before seeing the headline and getting excited about this apparent scare story, but there were also seemingly endless comments from people who understood my correlation-causality project but could not help putting forward a possible causal link anyway. It is such a hard-wired instinct to assume there must be causality at play.

... The good news is that the more information about correlation and statistics people have, the better equipped they will be to overcome the natural desire to leap to causality conclusions. Or maybe that's just a coincidence.

This thread is wonderful, classic, and above all, filled with delicious irony. What a great treat to end this year!