

Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions (2002) [pdf] - __Joker
http://persweb.wabash.edu/facstaff/hortonr/articles%20for%20class/pelham,%20mirenberg,%20and%20jones%20implicit%20egotism.pdf

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tjradcliffe
This is a nice example of a statistically significant effect that has
negligible predictive value, but that is sold precisely on that value. The
title of the paper--"Why Susie Sells Sea Shells at the Sea Shore"\--is clearly
intended to suggest that implicit egotism results not just in a statistically
significant effect, but a usefully predictive one.

But the questions of where Susie lives and what she does for a living are not
answered in any ordinarily meaningful way by the effect the paper identifies.

If I have a coin with a few percent bias toward heads, it would be easy to
prove this in a couple of hundred flips, but if I were to say _every single
time it landed heads_ , "That's because it's not a fair coin" people would
look at me funny.

And yet we do this all the time with far weaker causal factors: every
significant weather event in the past decade as been reported as "due to
global warming", even though we can be pretty sure that even without global
warming there would still be weather, including extreme weather, and even
people who take the detailed results of climate models more seriously than I
do don't claim they predict shifts in extreme weather event distributions that
are detectable on a decadal timescale.

Moral: we should be cautious about jumping from a statistically significant
effect on distributions to a usefully causal account about individuals, even
when it is pretty likely that correlation does imply causation, as is the case
here.

