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A comment on Popularity of technology on Stack Overflow and Hacker News: Causality Analysis. Parent comment

Re:Popularity of technology on Stack Overflow and Hacker New... by ChrisLomont on Sunday June 10, 2018 @09:56AM (#17278118)
That's why the author didn't simply look at correlation, but used Granger causality tests.
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Re:Popularity of technology on Stack Overflow and Hacker New... by red75prime on Sunday June 10, 2018 @10:12AM (#17278186)
And then the author remarked that Granger causality doesn't indicate causation. It is a measure of how well one variable predicts upcoming changes in another. It doesn't mean that direct manipulation of the first variable will necessarily influence the second one.
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Re:Popularity of technology on Stack Overflow and Hacker New... by thanatropism on Sunday June 10, 2018 @10:33AM (#17278284)
Causation is an ill-defined concept. Already Aristotle had to define several kinds of causation, and philosophers still struggle with it.

It's even possible, per Hume, that causation doesn't actually exist.

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Re:Popularity of technology on Stack Overflow and Hacker New... by hexane360 on Sunday June 10, 2018 @06:36PM (#17280556)
Granger causality is basically just a time-shifted correlation. It doesn't prove causation any more than a correlation test (although it's directional in a way regular correlations aren't).
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