By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024.
Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the oppor...
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causation
Can you have causation without correlation? (Surprisingly, yes)
Usually, when X causes Y that means that X is correlated with Y. This may seem obvious simply because correlation is simply a measure of the extent to which Y goes up, on average, when X goes up. But, fascinatingly, there are some special cases where you can have causation WITHOUT correlation.
Here are five ways causation without correlation can occur:
1. Averaging: increasing A sometimes causes increasing B, but other times, it causes B to decrease. The two balance out. Since correlation...
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What’s the link between depression and anxiety?
If you study depression and anxiety (in the U.S.), you find that they are correlated to a shockingly high degree (e.g., in one of my studies, when I correlated PHQ-9 depression scale scores with GAD-7 anxiety scale scores, I found that r = 0.82 ).
Additionally, many studies have found that SSRIs (and other medications) help people with both depression and anxiety, as do certain therapeutic modalities such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, suggesting further linkage.
Fin...
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