Day: November 15, 2017

Essay Prompts: Correlation is not Causation

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Here’s an interesting fact: Humans are stupid. I don’t mean to imply we don’t have intelligence (although some who claim to have a high IQ, well, let’s just say they get elected to public office on other qualities). Rather, we put our trust in things we shouldn’t (and not just politicians). We are horrible at judging risk. We often see things that just are not there. We often believe the most ridiculous nonsense about cooking, such as fresh ground salt is better.  Worst of all, we often confuse correlation with causation.

  • Correlation: a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things
  • Causation: the relationship between cause and effect; causality.

Here are two examples of this confusion I’ve seen in my news feeds and on FB:

One fellow wrote about a friend of his that got a good report from the doctor in a followup visit, stating: “He’s definitely living proof that God answers prayers.” No, he isn’t. It is wonderful that the friend is doing better, but there is no causality here. You can pray to God or a Saint and get better, but that is not proof that God or the Saint was *why* you got better, no matter what the Pope says. There is no proven or provable, testable, repeatable method of showing that one action causes the other.

Another fellow wrote about high tax states, citing a article that he believed said that “high state taxes cause people to leave those states, making it very difficult to actually increase tax revenue, no matter how high their tax rates get.” Again, there’s no causality here. Yes people leave high tax states, but they leave low tax states as well, for many many reasons. Taxes may be a reason, but typically it isn’t the precipitating reason. And in the absence of clear evidence that whereever taxes are higher, people leave, this is just correlation. There are many high tax states where people don’t leave (witness property values in California) and high tax countries where people don’t leave. Further, “people” is far too nebulous a category, for all people are not the same. Are you talking those with wealth? Those on fixed incomes? Retirees? People in particular industries? The issue is just too nebulous to attribute to causality.

Always remember storks and babies. I had a statistics professor explain it this way: You may think there is a causality between storks and babies, because whereever there are more babies, there are more storks. But that’s a spurious correlation: there are more babies where there are more storks because there are more babies in big cities, and big cities often have zoos, which have more storks. No causality there.

Keep this in mind as you read your papers.

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Internet / Security

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

The never ending task of paring down my saved chum list brings you this collection of articles related to the Internet and Internet security. Pay attention folks — there’s some good stuff here. Also, remember the key adage: If you get a service for free, you are the product, not the customer.

  • Be Alert for Phishing. I’ve always opined that the key risk from the Equifax and other breaches is not identity theft, but phishing. Help Net agrees: they view phishing as a bigger threat than keyloggers or third party breaches. They researched the subject, and noted that “victims of phishing are 400x more likely to be successfully hijacked compared to a random Google user. In comparison, this rate falls to 10x for data breach victims and roughly 40x for keylogger victims. Keyloggers fall in between these extremes, with an odds ratio of roughly 40x”. The reason for this is that phishing kits also actively steal additional authentication factors (secret questions, phone number, device-related information, geolocation data) that can be used to impersonate the victim and bypass protections put in place by email (and other online service) providers.
  • So What is Phishing/Spearphishing? Here is a wonderful infographic/cartoon on how to protect yourself from Spearphishing. Along the way, it explains what spearphishing is, how it influenced an election (and potentially gave us President Trump) . It also contains some good tips about how to protect yourself from phishing. Note that, depending on where you work, this may be NSFW.
  • Lava Lamps and Security. Entropy. That’s “N”-“Tro”-“Pee”. Say it with me. Entropy is the property of how random your random numbers are. These numbers are usually generated by computers, and depend upon a random seed to start the process. A big issue is: how do you get the seed? Cloudflare does it in a very interesting and analog way: Lava Lamps. A lava lamp is a great way to generate randomness. Cloudflare videotapes its wall of colorful constantly morphing lava lamps and translates that video information into unique cryptographic keys.
  • Facebook Privacy. Remember my adage about getting a service for free? One such service is Facebook, and they don’t care about your privacy (and neither does that minx, Wendy). But you care about you, and that’s why you’re going to read this article about how to lock down your privacy settings on Facebook. Yes, you can make it so that when you go out searching for such-and-such for a friend (you know, that NSFW such-and-such), you aren’t suddenly deluged with ads on FB for that product.
  • Objectivity of Blog Sites. You’re probably familiar with them: all those blog sites that review this product and that product. Mattress blogs. Makeup blogs. Theatre blogs*. But there’s often a story behind the story about how manufacturers subtly influence them. Remember: if you get a product for free, what are you? Here’s a story I’ve been saving for a while about the Mattress Wars, where a bunch of new mattress stores started a war with mattress bloggers. *This, by the way, is one reason I do not accept free theatre tickets. I choose what I want to see and write about. I follow the ethical model of Consumers Reports. I will pay for tickets what I would have paid through the various discount ticket services I know about.

 

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