Which is why, centuries later, Karl Pearson, the founder of mathematical statistics, banned the notion of causality from the discipline, calling it “a fetish amidst the inscrutable arcana of modern science” and insisting that just by understanding simple correlation one “grasped the essence of the conception of association between cause and effect.”
His followers have kept it banished ever since. “Considerations of causality should be treated as they have always been in statistics: preferably not at all,” wrote a former president of the Biometric Society. “It would be very healthy if more researchers abandon thinking of and using terms such as cause and effect,” insisted another prominent social scientist.
Posted September 23, 2009 at 9:35am
