Repeat after me: correlation is not causation.

Repeat after me: saying "correlation is not causation" "slippery slope fallacy" or "survivorship bias" doesn't amount to an argument. They are thought-stopping words primarily used by midwits who think it makes them sound smart. I see this all the time on HN and it's annoying. Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong, otherwise you're no better than him.

The point is to get the person to actually supply real evidence instead of unfounded associations. If someone can't come up with a feasible way they actually are, or even could be causal in nature to discuss, then they probably should be shut down. If someone can't muster up the barest excuse for how their argument makes sense, then I won't be sad to see them stop talking about it.

If someone tried to shut down my argument with one of those excuses and I didn't know enough about each of them to either explain away their influence or revise my theory, my first step would be to figure out what they are. To dismiss them is to just admit ignorance of statistics, and thus the world.

If: “The point is to get the person to actually supply real evidence instead of unfounded associations.” then say “That’s an assertion that you provided no evidence for. Do you have any evidence?” - writing “correlation is not causation” is to make yourself sound smart, not to ask for evidence, which can be done in a much clearer and less passive aggressive way by just straight up asking for it.

If your point is to say that those shouldn't be used in isolation, I agree with you (but I think your point was poorly expressed). If it's to say they shouldn't be used at all, which is what I read your original comment as, then I don't.

Of course my point was that they shouldn't be used in isolation - re-read my original comment, which states: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong." It wasn't poorly expressed, and you are nitpicking. Though had I known you'd nitpick, I would have said: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong in addition to it."

Why in the world would you furnish evidence or a solid argument for why somebody is wrong when that somebody didn't bother furnishing evidence or a solid argument for why they are right? It was just a bald-assed claim, and commenting "correlation is not causation" rather than just drive-by downvoting is charitable.

I think the reason that Firefox failed is because of their logo. No, I will not explain, and if you dismiss me without a well-reasoned argument, you're a pretentious mid-wit(?).

edit: ah, "midwit" is a neologism from the intellectual dark web. You're just defending the comment because you agree with it, and pretending it's a question of reason or civility. Who could have guessed?

> Of course my point was that they shouldn't be used in isolation - re-read my original comment, which states: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong."

Those responses are evidence for why it may be wrong. But in isolation they are needlessly terse. Lack of evidence is not the problem, lack of accompanying explanation of why they are evidence, and how they apply, is.

> Though had I known you'd nitpick, I would have said: "Furnish evidence or a solid argument for why he is wrong in addition to it."

And then it would be much clearer, not because I'm nitpicking, but because it's ambiguous otherwise, and open to the interpretation I came to. Since that's not what you intended, it's better to eliminate that misinterpretation.

The bottom line is that clarity is not a matter of intent, but of interpretation by others. At least one person (me) thought you were unclear, and I suspect others did as well. You can complain that they are nitpicking, or accept that you were misinterpreted, and expressing yourself differently might have avoided the problem. Only you can control that, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to blame other people if they aren't being purposefully obtuse (and I promise I'm not).

Fair point, and I’ll bear it in mind in the future.

Correlation can be because of causation

In this case it probably is though. They have done everything else than focus on the core product since he left and they continue that trend today even if it's failing one.

Not sure about that, even if I have to admit correlation is quite strong in this case.

Firefox decline in the past decade can also be partly credited by chrome eating the world. Firefox has a huge responsibility too because it became bad (at least performance wise?) at some point (or was it a little over 10 years ago?) and lost users because of this and has trouble recovering even if it has become better at this again, because people either moved on, embraced chrome (or a chromium-based browser) or I don't know what.

I want mozilla to survive and can't really say I support them if I don't use firefox so I came back to firefox after years using vivaldi. But I can see myself going back to vivaldi any time actually. I'm missing vivaldi features, firefox is slower for some/many use cases (mostly because things have been optimized for chrome).

I want to believe but I don't see how firefox can get back its market share. Now everything you build for the web has to be optimized for chrome, many don't even care if it is utterly broken on firefox because it's so niche.

That may be true, but it sounds like you particularly want to pin it on the 'woke' aspect even though there's a lot of other things involved.

I honestly think that is the main reason though. They are like many others obsessed with identity politics and push away everyone else that disagree (like myself). They send money on worthless (and racist) diversity projects, feminist filmmakers, random projects that they hope to bring in another source of revenue etc.

For example, their VPN service is not actually theirs, it's a Swedish company called Mullvad that actually provides the service. I am already a user of Mullvad and I can't get Firefox VPN. Isn't that kind of strange? Even if I could get it, why would I pay Mozilla extra money for a service that I can get cheaper directly from the provider? Not only that, but Mullvad accepts cash and I believe Mozilla VPN probably won't. So the privacy aspect is already bigger with simply using Mullvad to begin with. They go into the VPN business because they want to make money but paint the picture of that they want to protect the privacy of consumers. It's just a dishonest picture they're painting and I think users sense that a mile away these days. It's the woke mindset that they pretend to care but doesn't really. They just follow like so many other tech companies what's popular to care about in California and completely forget that the world is larger than one US state. And even if they did care, really a VPN service? That market is so overly saturated by hundreds of services it doesn't require a genius to realize that this will be a hard thing to make any kind of dough on.

Their ventures into other things have mostly been failing ones and if they really want to get rid of google the obvious choice is to monetize Firefox itself. I, like many others, would gladly pay for Firefox if I knew it went to the development of Firefox and maybe to other projects that benefits it like Rust, MDN etc. But if I donate today, my money will most likely go to Bakers ridiculous salary.

> I honestly think that is the main reason though.

I am pretty sure this is your biases distorting your perspective. Of course I may be biased as well, but take note that the entire conversation on this comment section is about Firefox's failures, which are numerable, and very little of it has anything to do with what you're talking about. For instance the guy's crazy salary has nothing to do with wokeness, as you well know -- it has to do with all the other reasons this is a dramatic failure of capitalism.

Mitchell Baker is actually the one who laid off everyone to focus on the core product.

She laid them because there was not enough money to pay them. Focusing on the core product is only option left when the company no longer has manpower to do everything.

It would be an achievement if she shifted focus as soon as she became CEO, but several years later is probably too late.

Also she killed MDN, and that’s a big loss for the internet.