Please Move The Deer Crossing Sign
by Wei Jing HO – Saturday, 21 September 2024, 2:28 AM
Number of replies: 6
As I read “The Statues of Daedalus”, it sort of reminded me of a sharing made by a prof. in my university days.
The prof. was doing a sharing on Econometrics and Social Science Methods, and shared this video/audio recording.
Video Title: ORIGINAL – Please Move The Deer Crossing Sign.
Weblink: https://youtu.be/RFCrJleggrI?feature=shared
A lady called a radio station to bring attention to what she felt was an irresponsible action.
She wrongly assume and believed that deer crossing signs caused deer to cross the highway more often, which results in high rate of vehicular-deer accidents.
The prof. was trying to bring across a point that “Correlation does not imply Causation”.
His deck was originally shared here. The Deer Lady mention happened in slide 14.: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/0B7Gp2xnhl_HNeHUxZGhBRl9NeUk/edit?resourcekey=0-sDnk2I60ZvSODlA1vOFhtw#slide=id.p1
It seems to have similarities to Plato’s assertion that “Knowledge is better than mere true belief because it is more stable”.
I do note the difference in that as a philosophical exploration, Plato’s Knowledge vs. Mere True Beliefs is metaphysical and meant to cover broader concepts of what is really true, while the Correlation is not equals to Causation reminder is a principle in statistics and scientific reasoning.
One thing that struck me is that while I do agreed with the Prof. and Plato. We do need a certain level of understanding of an entity, a domain, an environment or concept + openness to listen or accept differing justifications, before we can start the process of justifying our belief, to uncover evidence or reason of why the belief is true.
In most cases where we lack sufficient levels of knowledge of a subject area, we will still need to defer to / and believe in “expert advice”. And sometimes we may not know if the expert is correctly doing their job or doing roll of dice e.g., hiring consultants.
The rigor of our verification will need to depend on the constraints, situation and context we are dealing with. So I will end with it depends? This is my reply to whether I think Plato is right. Because I don’t think the answer for that question is a clear cut yes or no.
Re: Please Move The Deer Crossing Sign
by David Laflamme – Saturday, 21 September 2024, 10:35 PM
Wei, your post is informative, stimulating, and entertaining. I agree that it deals with issues not strictly epistemological and that it goes to the heart of what we believe to be true and what is actually true. I find it interesting that in the video the people hosting the call could not convince the caller that the alternative explanation was, in fact, the correct one. They relied on their own statement of belief to change the caller’s mind which, on the face of it, was no more or less logical than the caller’s rationale. We form a general worldview and interpret/explain what we perceive through that lens. Thank you for a great post!
Re: Please Move The Deer Crossing Sign
by Frank Roetker – Sunday, 22 September 2024, 11:50 AM
Hi Wei, the concept of ‘correlation != causation’ leads to the far more radical Problem of Induction (which I believe we’ll discuss later in the course). In basic, is it rational to trust future predictions based on our past experience?
Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them.
We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be
misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last
wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of
nature would have been useful to the chicken. (Russell, 1912, p. 63)
Past successes don’t always guarantee future ones, so I can see a distinction between the truth of a belief on happenstance and on knowledge. The challenge is if we can truly come to know the difference in the validity of the grounding of our beliefs.
Russell, B. (1912) The Problems of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
In reply to Frank Roetker
Re: Please Move The Deer Crossing Sign
by Amna Whiston – Sunday, 22 September 2024, 8:02 PM
Agree, Frank – good point/reference to Russell!
In reply to Frank Roetker
Re: Please Move The Deer Crossing Sign
by Wei Jing HO – Wednesday, 25 September 2024, 12:59 AM
Thank you Frank for the insight!
I agreed on that statement that “Past successes don’t always guarantee future ones”, if the world is more static and less alive, perhaps past success can predict the future state of an unchanging world.
But in a living world full with yet to be mapped unknown variables, even predictive analytics have a limited time window for predictions to have a high confidence rate.
Thanks for giving me a new reading material will check out Russell’s book.
Re: Please Move The Deer Crossing Sign
by James Carmichael – Thursday, 26 September 2024, 10:50 PM
Wei Jing, you might love it! The Russell, I mean. I think that professional philosophers are maybe a little sniffy these days about Russell (perhaps Professor Whiston could weigh in, if she cares to!) since his substantive contributions to logic have (I think) long been supplanted and much of what is left is his latter-life public intellectual work. But *I*– a craven neophyte–have found much of that work to be engaging and educational. I’ve read *The Problems of Philosophy* (a small book!) and *A History of Western Philosophy* (a very big book!) recently, and got a lot out of each of them, although the latter sure has some looooooooooooong bits to work through before getting to what many of us on this course–if I may make such a bold presumption–might consider ‘the good stuff’. The former, though–as Frank’s post quotes–has what was for me a clear and edifying exposition of the problem of the induction that has stuck with me and was helpful when I first hit it in Hume and so on (Hume doesn’t use the same language, of course, so I remember being like, “oh…wait…is this the…this is the…oh!”).
In reply to Wei Jing HO
Re: Please Move The Deer Crossing Sign
by P. D. – Monday, 14 October 2024, 3:19 AM
Wei Jing HO did a great job highlighting the connection between the philosophical concept of knowledge vs. true belief and the practical example of the misinterpreted relationship between cause and effect. I believe this discussion effectively shows how it is important not only to have the truth, but also to understand the reasons and context that support that true belief.
But… While understanding context and reasons is crucial, it can sometimes be difficult or unrealistic to expect everyone to engage with deeper justifications for every belief. In practical, everyday situations, people often rely on simpler true beliefs without the full background knowledge, and they still manage to function effectively. The balance between knowing the truth and understanding its underlying complexities can vary depending on the situation. Not every belief requires deep philosophical inquiry, though it can certainly lead to more stable and informed decisions when possible.