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About time we revisted this: https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Also, why is this flagged?
"Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies" LMAO does the author really take themselves seriously as they type that. This author has no understanding of statistical methods. This sort of article is the reason why people distrust science. Not because the scientific method is flawed, but rather because nonsense like this get published.
Here are a few links explaining the terms:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7384548/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_regression
https://lost-stats.github.io/Model_Estimation/Research_Desig...
I don’t know why people distrust science. Sure, it’s not perfect, and scientists, like all people are subject to human problems. But there’s nothing else in the history of the world with a better track record than science. I feel like the problem is that some politicians spread FUD and prey on people’s insecurities, and unfortunately it tends to work, disproportionately on people with less resources. The problem isn’t science at all; the problem is people and politics.
So... Let me get this straight. Because people who had iPhones during the AT&T exclusive period has less kids... They think there is no other possibly explanation besides the iPhone, because they looked at similar groups on different networks and in different areas that didn't yet have coverage for iPhones? It definitely couldn't have been due to richer people having iPhones and having less kids, or people preferring…
I suggest you read the abstract, at least. The fact that only AT&T had the iPhone back then resulted in a natural experiment: It was only available in certain regions. You can thus compare regions where it was available and where it wasn't, while controlling for "richer people" or "people preferring iPhones". As a rule of thumb, if you look at something for 3 minutes and have some obvious questions, the scientists th…
This study treats ATT doing market research and progressive rollout through prioritized markets as a "natural experiment".
We could at least agree it's specifically chosen population, whatever ATT marketing dept had in mind when they planned the rollout.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because correlation is not causation. If A and B correlate there's 3 options: 1) A causes B 2) B causes A 3) C causes both B and A (in some order) 4) your correlation figure is bullshit (hence not counted in the 3 options, but certainly with news these days, it must be mentioned) A famous way to illustrate where this goes wrong is to show a map which libraries that loaned out Harry Potter books, and a map of where po…
The 5th option is random chance. That often results from p-hacking. In a world of infinite variables, if you look hard enough you are guaranteed to eventually find two completely unrelated variables that correlate with each other over a statistically significant period of time.
Smartphones massively reduce the barriers to entry for self-directed career-based, social, political and educational activity (plus entertainment, but gambling addicts have differing fertility patterns so lesser degrees of it are useless to study). Outside observers may consider the real-world quality of such activities to be low, but the activity they enable people to do in their many brief lulls of free time between different daily tasks do fit into those buckets more than anything else. And the cumulative effect of all of them is to delay life milestones.
"Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies" LMAO does the author really take themselves seriously as they type that. This author has no understanding of statistical methods. This sort of article is the reason why people distrust science. Not because the scientific method is flawed, but rather because nonsense like this get published.
What exactly is the problem with that sentence? Are you sure the problem isn’t that you don’t understand what it means? Here are a few links explaining the terms: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7384548/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_regression https://lost-stats.github.io/Model_Estimation/Research_Desig... I don’t know why people distrust science. Sure, it’s not perfect, and scientists, like all peo…
"The problem isn’t science at all; the problem is people and politics."
Agree completely.
I'll bite. Maybe it's not the iPhone itself, but social media. I have seen studies about damages that social media can cause in behaviours. This might be one of them. Smartphones are the catalyst to social media consumption as we know. Like people contantly on their phones everywhere instead of interacting with other people, for example.
Why not go further? It's the Internet as a whole. People socialising online, and online becoming an actual place people spend their entire lives within, free from the hard constraints of the real world, was the natural evolution of the Internet. Plenty has been written about how any technological innovation leads to massive societal changes no one could foresee, and no one could avoid, but only analyze in retrospect.
https://jacobin.com/2026/06/birth-rates-capitalism-socialism...
The emphasis on "it takes a village" seems strangely misplaced, as well. It presumes that culture is so malleable that a shift in government policy can change the culture overnight. Have East Germans completely abandoned their supposed previous culture of taking care of relatives/neighbors children after the fall? If there was a genuine cultural difference in communally raising children, and that was meant to improve fertility rates, you would expect to see higher fertility rates reflected regardless of the current government policy.