For those who forgot their schooling, scurvy is a vitamin deficiency disease due to lack of ascorbic acid in the diet. It is fully curable with a small quantity of almost any fresh food. The disease manifests in extraordinarily complex ways that betray its simple etiology.
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My point is twofold. First, don't neglect your vitamin C! Second, if your explanation for something is a complex quilt of reasons, and those explanations don't give you predictive power, then you don't understand what you're explaining. Recognize the early symptoms of ignorance.
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I wrote a long essay on how the cure for scurvy was lost and found without anyone noticing, which I will promote again because it bears directly on the topic of fooling ourselves about what we know, and having high confidence in inadequate explanations https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm …
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I understand that the Solar System is a complex place, a chaotic dynamical system that can't be reduced to simplistic laws just to satisfy a human desire for order. The epicycles in the model reflect the complexity inherent in Nature. Any attempt to simplify is anthropic fallacy.pic.twitter.com/qa4ceF4P3u
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The comparison is false. Scurvy was a low-hanging fruit, a stroke of luck where everything can be explained by one factor. The vast majority of diseases are not like that.
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Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Look here for an recent example of correlation/causation being hard *anyway*:https://mobile.twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1258607277357006849 …
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No that’s about a non-causal paper.
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