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TEDx Talks
Published: 2012-11-05
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B271L3NtAw
welcome I came here today to warn you about the dangers of ice cream you may not be aware of this but these innocent looking cones full of sweetness or one of the major causes of drownings not got the numbers to prove it so if you plot the growth of that number of ice cream that are sold you compared with the number of drownings you can see
there is clearly an Alborz trends and I think it's very safe to conclude from this that we should ban ice cream because it's very dangerous since you are all smart people you've probably figured out there something wrong with my example what's really happening here is of course that there is an underlying factor which is nice weather you might of guessed it if the weather is nice
more people will go out swimming and unfortunately drowned at the same time more people will buy ice cream and it's not the ice cream that's causing the drownings and here it's really easy to see that there is something wrong but jumping to an incorrect conclusion about causality when you see a correlation is to most often made logical mistake sure you can I think and I really
in the few and I'll do this by just giving some famous and the first on this really effect this that's married men live longer than say if you look at the statistics you see that this is really happen M. flow women's magazine they like to conclude from this that is very healthy for men because it makes them live longer well a friend of mine like studio
that marriage mainly makes life seem longer but that's because his wife is so but so can anyone guess what's going on here because there is a causal relation but it's the other way around the fact is that men who are healthy and we're rich and well educated and have a much higher life expectancy these are the men that are much more likely to find a wife
that's the way women are and the guys who have a very low life expectancy so there I'm healthy and poor they are not as likely to get married so it's the high life expectancy that is causing the marriage not the other way around well in this of course you know it's not so serious no one will get married just because he read this so let's move
to a more serious example it was also more serious research in nature of the study in nineteen ninety nine that showed that young kids who sleep with the lights some that they have a much higher probability of becoming shortsighted later in life but other researchers they were smart and they wrote very careful that they had found the correlation and I didn't know how to causal relation
might work but just to be sure that Feist both parents to turn off the lights at nights and in the popular media this became that Bethlehem's were night abuse of children some views and that it was very bad if parents used limbs in the bathroom and many parents were worried so I can imagine if this would have happened when my son was sleeping with the lights
on I would felt really bad but luckily the article had to be correct that's the next week ends maybe so if you can guess I star by old Houston the in the audience they know a short sightedness is genetic and so it's parents who are short sighted and those are the parents who like to leave the light on in the bedroom and they also are the
parents who have short sighted kids so again you know a simple mistake easy to make then what is I think of the worst example I know I know many of them I see at least one of these in the newspapers every week but this is a classic warm in the seventies researchers found that there's a very strong link between kids who do well in school get
good grades and kids who have high self esteem and they concluded from this that it's very important to make sure that young kids are you know race to be confident and proud of themselves because if their self esteem is high the good results will follow and this what what was told to parents especially in the U. S. for generations that just make sure that your kid
is proud and confident them all will turn out well and many years later someone did another study just to see in which direction the cause was working and they found that it was in the opposite direction so the good grades for causing the self esteem and self esteem wasn't causing good grades and it wasn't it was even worse so kids who are race just to have
high self confidence and not excel at anything it can be sports or music doesn't have to be school the kids are just proud of themselves and then fill it everything in the end they will have a very low self esteem and not be able to make anything of her life so this was a very serious correlation mistake what I want for today is for you to
remember that the next time someone wants to prove that there is a causal relation between something then something else it can be anything that can be fixed scenes and autism it can be female bankers and the financial crisis and if they point out to you that there is a very strong relation remembered that it's not enough to have a correlation it gives a very good hint
