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To: garbanzo
The universe of predictive relationship (correlations) tends towards infinity.

I would think that a "predictive" relationship requires a predictor. If roosters crowed only on uninhabited planets, no one would claim that they cause the sun to rise. Similarly, if roosters crowed only at noon, no one would claim that they cause the sun to rise. Not every imaginable relationship is necessarily predictive.

Think of it as a Venn diagram where casual relationships are a tiny circle inside a much much larger circle of predictive relationships. Randomly throwing darts at the circle, you're much more likely to land outside the inner circle than inside it.

You can't "randomly" throw darts at a circle. If you are throwing "at" the circle, you are aiming for it and there is nothing "random" about the deliberate act of aiming.

46 posted on 07/02/2010 11:16:08 AM PDT by Theophilus (Not merely prolife, but prolific!)
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To: Theophilus
Not to belabor this, but I think we're talking different universes. I'm talking the mathematics of what a correlation is (a predictive relationship between two variables as measured by a correlation coefficient) and you're talking something else, I don't know what. You can measure significantly non-zero correlations (the mathematical kind) between an almost infinite set of variables. Only a few of these end up being causal relations.

You can't "randomly" throw darts at a circle.

It helps if you're blindfolded while doing it.

47 posted on 07/02/2010 1:20:36 PM PDT by garbanzo (Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.)
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