Name: 【TEDx】The danger of mixing up causality and correlation: Ionica Smeets at TEDxDelft
Uploaded: 2014-06-12T10:47:49.000Z
Duration: 5 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

but these innocent looking cones full of sweetness

are one of the major causes of drownings.

So, if you plot a graph of the number of ice-creams that are sold,

and you compare it with the number of drownings,

you can see there is clearly an upwards trend,

and I think it's very safe to conclude from this

that we should ban ice-cream because it's very dangerous.

What's really happening here is, of course,

which is nice weather, you might have guessed it.

and unfortunately drown, and at the same time,

And it's not the ice-cream that's causing the drownings.

but jumping to an incorrect conclusion about causality

in the future you can recognize this mistake.

And I really hope you can avoid making it

And I'll do this by just giving some famous examples.

And the first one is really rather innocent.

If you look at the statistics, you see that

And women's magazines, they like to conclude from this

Well, a friend of mine, he likes to joke that

But so, can anyone guess what's going on here?

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,

it's not so serious, no one will get married

In Nature there was a study in 1999 that showed

that young kids who sleep with the lights on,

and they didn't know how the causal relation might work,

but just to be sure they advised all parents

And in the popular media this became that

bed lamps were night abuse, children's abuse,

I can imagine, if this would have happened

when my son was sleeping with the lights on,

But luckily, the article had to be corrected

the next week, and maybe some of you can guess,

and if there are biologists in the audience, they know.

And so, it's parents who are short-sighted.

So again, a simple mistake, easy to make.

Then, what is I think the worst example I know --

researchers found that there is a very strong link

between kids who do well in school, get good grades,

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【TEDx】The danger of mixing up causality and correlation: Ionica Smeets at TEDxDelft

cause

applause

life

esteem