Amerika

We all like easy answers that involve a method, such as writing a law, that seems to cure everything at once. It feels absolute and perfect. This instills in us a mental calmness because we believe things are under our control, or at least under control.

This leads us to backward cognition because instead of reasoning from cause to effect, we come up with an effect we want (calm mental state) and organized our perception of events around us to fit that. It is the classic “thesis in search of data” cherry-picking means-over-ends rationalization that defines bad human thinking.

Michael Crichton called the resulting inversion and reversed cognition “wet streets make rain.” That is, people observed that when the streets were wet, it was raining, therefore assumed that wetting the streets brought the rain, similar to cargo cults, neurosis in the Jungian sense, expectation bias, and other perceptual errors.

We can see an example in the latest story of education magic for the superstitious idol-worshipers:

Results indicate that students with stronger verbal abilities, and who are more curious, open-minded, and intellectually rigorous, are more likely to study philosophy. Nonetheless, after accounting for such baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on a measure of valuable habits of mind. This offers the strongest evidence to date that studying philosophy does indeed make people better thinkers.

They claim to have statistically separated out raw ability, but failed to recognize that the type of person to take a philosophy degree is also most likely destined for graduate school, and therefore, most likely to have the abilities needed for critical thinking.

Colleges make the same mistake. The kids who go through college end up becoming better office workers; therefore, since everyone is equal, it must be college that did it! No, they were always heading in that direction and the education was a means they employed to help in that goal, not the source of it.

The following study addresses the correlation/cause confusion inherent to observational studies when trying to assess meat and its role in cancers… or lack thereof:

They found no increased risk of death associated with higher intake of animal protein. In fact, the data showed a modest but significant reduction in cancer-related mortality among those who ate more animal protein.

The researchers found no associations between total protein, animal protein or plant protein and risk of death from any cause, cardiovascular disease, or cancer. When both plant and animal protein were included in the analysis, the results remained consistent, suggesting that plant protein has a minimal impact on cancer mortality, while animal protein may offer a small protective effect.

Observational studies like this one cannot prove cause and effect; however, they are valuable for identifying patterns and associations in large populations.

Most likely, those with few mutations are biologically healthy, and therefore tend to eat meat but also tend to get fewer cancers. The whole “meat causes cancer” riff was designed to explain why poorer people got more cancers, and no one would look at mutation load because that violates equality.

For the final “wet streets make rain,” there is the case of the demonic social media that turned your kids into zombies:

Problematic use of social media is linked to depressive symptoms, loneliness and low self-esteem, according to a doctoral dissertation published by the University of Oulu on Monday.

Doctoral researcher Krista Hylkilä also found that people with ADHD symptoms are predisposed to problematic use of social media.

Problematic social media use is defined as having difficulty resisting the urge to use social media even though the usage interferes with one’s everyday life and well-being.

Moving past the weasel words “linked to” we can see that people who already have ADHD, depression, loneliness, and low self-esteem are drawn to the internet as a form of self-medication. The condition existed prior to the use of social media, and social media is just the latest outlet.

Our science worked originally because it believed in testing before and after conditions to find cause. In the hands of egalitarians, especially behavioralists and Marxists, this translated through the assumption that all people are equal into exclusively looking for external influences that could explain results.

Genetics, character, and intelligence were discarded, and that elimination of a feared notion led naturally to the inversion of thought and therefore, the assumption that college, philosophy degrees, eating meat, or social media could change our fundamental characters or abilities.

Like most things modern, it is comical when viewed in the right context.

Tags: causation, correlation, inverted cognition, wet streets make rain