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If correlation = causation it appears organic food causes autism. The p values are nearly in perfect alignment. http://boingboing.net/2013/01/01/correlation-between-autism-dia.html
Looks like autism diagnoses causes organic food sales.If correlation = causation it appears organic food causes autism. The p values are nearly in perfect alignment. http://boingboing.net/2013/01/01/correlation-between-autism-dia.html
clearly it's an increased dose effect.Looks like autism diagnoses causes organic food sales.
The rise in autism precedes the organic food sales - even more so if we consider that the child has autism for a certain amount of time before they are diagnosed.clearly it's an increased dose effect.
as people eat more organic food it causes even more autism
It's just a matter of recognizing that the past is different. We had science based medicines in the past too, like radium for ... everything. Radium was discovered by science so it must be good. People took the stuff as a tonic and when their teeth and hair fell out they took more. Science is wonderful, but once its products move from academia to the market place then different forces take over. It's one thing to have your scientific reputation on the line (and even those arguments got pretty venal) but it's another matter entirely to have millions of dollars of profit on the line but worse even than that, billions of dollars of liabilities.Sounds like you're romanticizing the past.
The rise in autism precedes the organic food sales - even more so if we consider that the child has autism for a certain amount of time before they are diagnosed.
Which means that pregnant women should avoid organic foods, the more organic food they eat, the higher their risk of having an autistic child, who then grows up with a addiction to organic food.
I suggest you go look at the graph. Autism rates rise first and THEN organic food sales rise. If any causation was going to be inferred from this correlation it is clearly the opposite of what is being implied.
A non-causation correlation between the data sets would be something like:
- A) an autism diagnosis in the family results in the mother buying more organic food for her family
- B) eating organic food results in mothers having their children tested for autism
You know what's funny about Wakefield? I always used to lambaste him as a loon too until something Rebecca Watson said that I had never heard before though she didn't seem to notice that she'd said it.@Redrumloa and @FluffyMcDeath
And more directly to this thread the political and financial motives that caused Andrew Wakefield to create false research so he could market his own cures instead is one we're still fighting today.
Right, Wakefield wasn't anti-vaxx. He was anti-competitive because the triple MMR manufacturer had a product whose marketplace was against his own. As a result he tried to fudge the science, claiming results his work didn't show, and claiming a new disease which didn't exist. This shows my point how 'science' can be manipulated by financial and political gains. Specifically in this case by Wakefield.Wakefield said that he had found the measles strain in the MMR causing persistent infection in kids guts, especially those with autism and that this inflammation was a new and previously unknown phenomenon. Further, he did not see this with the old measles vaccine - so he recommended that instead of taking the MMR, parents take the older measles, mumps and rubella vaccines separately. Wakefield said, don't take the single shot MMR, take three separate shots. That is hardly a position that should be called "anti-vaxx". However, the UK at the time was moving to get rid of the three vaccine schedule all together. Andrew Wakefield may have been wrong, but it's also important to realize that he HAD to be wrong.
So, if thing A causes thing B then is causation but if thing B causes thing A then it's non-causation?
There are many differences but not all bad as you wasted who knows how long trying to convince me otherwise. For one, back in the days when Radium was used, there wasn't much science to back it up. Medicine was very loosely based on science and no one really had a good understanding of radiation or cancer back then. And yet, those wild experiments that ended badly planted the seeds for future techniques and we still use radiation to fight cancer today - although very differently and with much greater success. Medicine will always be a pioneering effort and as with all pioneers risk is a huge part of it. And I think most people understand that.It's just a matter of recognizing that the past is different.
Sorry, perhaps I confused you because I inadvertently reused your labels for different things. You used A and B to label two specific scenarios, and I used A and B to be two relatable things. I should have chosen X & Y or some such.they were separate examples of non-causation correlations