we talk all the time about correlation versus causality. And what makes data so hard is that the only thing you actually see in the data directly is correlation, right? You just know whether two things tend to go together. Causality comes from something deeper. Causality is something which, absent a randomized experiment, you have to intuit or trick the data into revealing. And all we really care about is causality, and that’s the fundamental challenge of social science in a world where you see correlations. How can you know causality? And that’s where the art and the fun and the joy of what
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