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How Correlated Are You?

allendowney.com

11–20 of 59 posts

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#11

A colleague once pronounced correlation "co-relation" and it made more sense so now I say it that way sometimes. Anyone else do that?

Do people not try to work out the ethymology of words? Everything makes more sense when you know where words came from and how they came to be. :)

You could almost say they're co-related.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people not try to work out the ethymology of words? Everything makes more sense when you know where words came from and how they came to be. :)

I do somehow because of my inherent interest in understanding the world. However, this got me intro communication issues with my former boss. Apparently, this person was not interested in what words (or combinations of words) actually mean but rather simply just how they're used frequently. Every new combination of words was utterly confusing to this person. As a conclusion, I try to figure out how people process lan…

Most people are still on step 1 (learning what the individual words mean). They don't get to the stage of learning how the different words fit together.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#13
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do somehow because of my inherent interest in understanding the world. However, this got me intro communication issues with my former boss. Apparently, this person was not interested in what words (or combinations of words) actually mean but rather simply just how they're used frequently. Every new combination of words was utterly confusing to this person. As a conclusion, I try to figure out how people process lan…

Most people are still on step 1 (learning what the individual words mean). They don't get to the stage of learning how the different words fit together.

I put quotes around words to differentiate when I’m using them incorrectly but popularly. By definition the goalpost has also been shifted.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people not try to work out the ethymology of words? Everything makes more sense when you know where words came from and how they came to be. :)

I do somehow because of my inherent interest in understanding the world. However, this got me intro communication issues with my former boss. Apparently, this person was not interested in what words (or combinations of words) actually mean but rather simply just how they're used frequently. Every new combination of words was utterly confusing to this person. As a conclusion, I try to figure out how people process lan…

If you're interested in that sort of thing, on mental model that makes sense is people keep a little blob of context in their head, and use the words coming in to update the blob. Then at the end of the sentence they guess what you meant and respond to that, blind to what you was actually said as the tape recorder hears it.

Which would be a very sensible way of working for people who don't have a lot of short term memory to play with, since remembering a complex sentence to parse is impossible. But it makes it challenging to process words as though they have inherent meaning, because they are really acting as deltas to some state. The precise meaning of the word cannot be preserved because it is conflated with the sentence as a whole.

You see that abused a lot in politics, where people say one thing in a way that means what they say and the impression they give are different. So if trends go one way they supported the trend, and if the trends go the other way then they never actually said anything in support.

I'll probably get away with pointing at Trump as an interesting example of that in reverse where his sentences usually don't make sense if you try to interpret them as sentences, but are crystal clear as a series of updates to some blob of state.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#15
Maybe this is obvious but in the original data, did they exclude rugby players, wrestlers, people with other kind of ear injuries?

Cauliflower ear can totally change the shape and size of your ear.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people not try to work out the ethymology of words? Everything makes more sense when you know where words came from and how they came to be. :)

I do somehow because of my inherent interest in understanding the world. However, this got me intro communication issues with my former boss. Apparently, this person was not interested in what words (or combinations of words) actually mean but rather simply just how they're used frequently. Every new combination of words was utterly confusing to this person. As a conclusion, I try to figure out how people process lan…

> coherent

That's another one that's useful to think about: it's the same "-herent" as "adherent" and "inherent". One means "stick together", one means "stick to" and the other means "sticks into" (I.e. is part of).

"Hesitate" comes from the same root and means "stick in place".

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#17

A colleague once pronounced correlation "co-relation" and it made more sense so now I say it that way sometimes. Anyone else do that?

Do people not try to work out the ethymology of words? Everything makes more sense when you know where words came from and how they came to be. :)

One of my favourite language-related sites is the online etymology dictionary, which has the following entry for 'correlation' for anyone interested: https://www.etymonline.com/word/correlation#etymonline_v_191...

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#18
Strange that an article by someone interested in Bayesian statistics (according to the website banner) would not consider measurement error here. It seems likely to me that ear measurements are harder to make accurately than measurements of larger body parts, which would drive down the correlations. Furthermore, I suspect that measurement error is inversely proportional to the size of the part being measured. If so, there should be a correlation between the mean value and the mean correlation with all other parts.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#19
post #4

Surprising article. The conclusion that ear protrusion (yes, that's a thing) has no genetic basis is of course not impossible, but seems unlikely. It would require another data set to establish it.

Ear protrusion is heritable: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8500
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