Oct. 26, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
12:29
3110 Correlation Is Not Causation - Not An Argument!
Question: "I’m skeptical of anyone who says with absolute certainty that A is directly responsible for B. There are far too many variables to say for certain whether spanking a child for their misbehavior impacts the child adversely. Correlation does not equal causation. Just as one should be skeptical of the “wage gap” between men and women, etc. Advocating something because you believe it can be admirable, but using flawed studies and statistics doesn’t make you right. "The Facts About Spankinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONNRfflggBgPeaceful Parenting Series: Raising Children Without Aggressionhttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMNj_r5bccUwZY7RCZnS2e5-vjaA7wSNwThe Primordial Violence: Spanking Children, Psychological Development, Violence, and Crime by Murray Strausshttp://www.fdrurl.com/MurrayStrausFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux, Freedom Aid Radio.
Great question from Eric K., who says, I'm skeptical of anyone who says with absolute certainty that A is directly responsible for B. There are far too many variables to say for certain whether spanking a child for their misbehavior impacts the child adversely.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Just as one should be skeptical of the wage gap between men and women, etc., advocating something because you believe it can be admirable, but using flawed studies and statistics, typically undertaken by someone with an agenda, doesn't make you right.
Now, for those of you who've been following my channel for the last little while, I have been occasionally typing three wonderful and hopefully instructive words underneath this kind of stuff, which is not an argument.
And the reason I'm doing that is because people are not making arguments.
So Eric is saying this is the argument from skeptical confusion or whatever you want to call it.
It's like he hasn't actually disproven anything that I'm saying.
He's just fear, uncertainty, and doubt, mudfarting over the whole set of syllogisms and saying doubt and therefore so on, right?
So, anyone who says with absolutely certainty that A is directly responsible for B. So this comes from, we had Dr.
Elizabeth Grischoff on the show and a variety of other experts.
And they have done an analysis of, gosh, if I think it was right, over 80 spanking studies.
And they found that spanking is highly correlated with a lowering of a child's IQ, with social dysfunction, with cognitive problems, depression, anxiety.
And a wide variety of other negative outcomes.
And, well, that's bad, right?
Now, his arguments, or the arguments that come back against it, is this thing, well, you see, but it's not that spanking lowers IQ, it's just that lower IQ people are more likely to spank, and because IQ has a genetic component, it's really the genetics that are transmitting both the spanking and the low IQ. It's not blah, blah, blah.
Well, of course, that's been dealt with in the studies by measuring children before the spanking commences and afterwards and seeing if the IQ lowers and looking and controlling for a wide variety of other variables, malnutrition and so on as well.
What happens is when people hear something that makes them uncomfortable, and since the majority of you who are listening to this were most likely spanked and some considerably harshly spanked for considerable periods of time with considerable frequency, it's uncomfortable to hear that it had a destructive it's uncomfortable to hear that it had a destructive outcome.
And so what happens is people hear something like these...
And you can look at the truth about spanking.
We can put a link to that below.
But what happens is they hear that spanking is associated with negative outcomes.
And I've not just done that.
I've got...
Does spanking violate the non-aggression principle, which is the non-initiation of force?
And I've got the whole argument series there.
So once you have the theory that it's immoral and that happens to correlate with outcomes that are negative, lower IQ... Okay, so we have something that's bad in theory, immoral in theory, and bad in practice.
Well, see, that's worse than smoking.
Smoking is not immoral in theory because it's your own body and so on.
And forcing other people to breathe smoke, which is kind of what spanking is as an analogy, that's wrong.
Spanking is without a doubt the initiation of force because it's not self-defense against a child's attack.
Against you, right?
I mean, so 80% of British moms hit their children before their children are even one year old.
Well, I don't think they're doing that because their babies are launching themselves from the skylights in some sort of Kato-style ninja moves, nunchucking them in the boobs.
So, clearly, that is the initiation of force.
And the arguments about, well, you know, if the child's running into traffic or grabs a hot stove or whatever, well, those are invalid.
Of course, some It is your job as a parent to prevent your child from being in dangerous situations.
So if your child is very young, then you hold their hand and that way they're not going to run into traffic.
Or you build a fence around your yard so that they won't run into traffic.
Because if you're close enough to hit your child, then you're close enough to prevent your child from doing something like running into traffic.
Or the stove, just turn the handles towards the back, build a little fence around the stove.
They're all over the place.
They're very cheap.
And you don't have to hit people in order to instruct them.
And you certainly don't have to hit children.
If your child is old enough to reason with, then you should reason with your child.
And I started reasoning with my daughter morally and in other ways when she was 16 to 18 months.
And the studies are very clear that even babies from 3 to 6 to 9 months can begin to make moral decisions and choose better paths.
And you just have to be patient and show them the way.
So if you're hitting your child, either they are able to be reasoned with, in which case you're hitting them instead of reasoning with them, which is clearly wrong.
What did we say?
Use your words, not your fists.
I mean, if you're doing to your kids what you would rail against your kids doing to others, then you have a higher moral standard for a four-year-old than you do for a 30-year-old.
And that's retarded, I'm afraid to say.
So either you're hitting your children when your children are able to reason, in which case you're using your fists, not your words, or your hand, not your words.
Or your child is not able to reason because they're so young, in which case, why would you have expectations that they do something correct when they can't even find their own face with their hands?
That's also quite ridiculous.
That's like blaming a sleeper for not jogging.
So, of course, correlation does not equal causation.
I get that.
You know, it's raining out and people have their umbrellas up.
Boy, if they hadn't put their umbrellas up, it sure as hell wouldn't have rained.
But that doesn't mean that we can't figure out some essence of correlation and causation.
And the fundamental argument against banking is that it's evil.
It's immoral.
It is the initiation of the use of force.
It is bullying behavior because usually the people who are spanking are 5, 7, 9 or 10 times the size of the people that are spanking.
Children are helpless and dependent upon their parents.
Children are not in a chosen relationship.
You can choose to have children.
Your children don't choose you.
Your wife can choose to date you, to become engaged to you, to get married to you.
She can choose to leave at any time.
And we recognize that hitting your wife when she doesn't do what you want is assault and is immoral.
Well, clearly we should have higher standards of behavior.
In less voluntary relationships.
And also, I was taught when I was growing up that whenever there is an imbalance of power Higher moral standards are required.
So, of course, if co-workers want to date, that's one thing, because they don't have any power over each other.
But if a boss asks out his secretary, well, there's an imbalance of power, Clinton's accepted, and therefore that is not good.
So, where there's an imbalance of power, we need higher moral standards, not lower moral standards, and there is no imbalance in power.
Perhaps outside of solitary confinement political prisoners, there is no imbalance of power greater in the world than that between parent and child.
You have size on your side, you have independence, you have economic...
You have authority, you have economic independence, you have the law on your side, and the child is helpless and is there, can't leave, can't run, and so on.
So the idea that where the power imbalance in a human relationship is the greatest, we should have the greatest capacity to initiate the use of force, that makes no sense whatsoever at all.
You understand this makes no sense at all.
That's like saying, well, it's really wrong for a car salesman to beat you until you buy a car, but it's perfectly great for a political prisoner to be beaten until he confesses, because X. So, when people fire this fog of, well, you haven't proven causation beyond a shadow of a doubt and so on...
I mean, they're just showing their emotional defenses.
They're just showing that they are avoiding the argument within their own mind by fogging out.
You know, the giant fog machine of fear, uncertainty, and doubt is what people generally spray over the predation of truth.
You know, like if you chase an octopus, it releases all of this ink into the water.
Or if you chase a reporter, he releases all of this ink in the socialism.
And this...
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt is, well, you haven't proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, and you can't prove 100%, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
But you see, that's not how the law works, right?
Beyond a reasonable doubt is how the law works.
You could always say, well, you know, this guy who you caught on tape strangling the hobo, he could have been beamed in, he could have been an identical twin, he could have been a wrinkle in the space-time continuum, blah, blah, blah.
Maybe the guy wasn't choked.
Maybe he just really grabbed his own throat and all the air molecules randomly through Brownian motion happened to move to the top of the room and the bottom was a vacuum and...
It's not how we make decisions in the real world, right?
You don't get a job at a restaurant, and then the next day you don't show up because the restaurant might have moved in the space-time continuum to the armpit of China, right?
No, you just deal with things as they are real.
And so when people put massive amounts of fear, uncertainty, and doubt into a relatively simple equation, the initiation of force against helpless and dependent children is both immoral and has highly negative outcomes, When they say, well, you know, but for each particular child, the difference, and ha, ha, ha, right?
Well, all they're saying is, your mouth shaping of factoids is making my inner child uncomfortable.
And so to rush to his defense, I'm not going to create a clear argument against you.
I'm simply going to imply that in this or any other possible alternative universe, there could be doubt about X, Y, and Z, and...
I could say, well, maybe he's dyslexic, and maybe every word that he writes is the exact opposite of what he means.
Victory!
Right?
We understand that would not be a very rational approach.
So, when you have the...
This is just around basic self-knowledge, right?
Socratic dictum, know thyself.
Basic self-knowledge demands and dictates that when information makes us uncomfortable, We analyze the source of our own discomfort and figure out what is going on within us that is making us feel uncomfortable about the information that is coming towards us.
Especially if the information is provided by experts who have decent amount of credibility and there's very little ambiguity about it and the source data is available and there's a clear moral argument for it, there are analogies for it and so on, right?
If the overwhelming evidence is on the side of the data that's coming at us, And yet we feel a very strong urge to push back and minimize and fog and all that.
Well, it's because there's some emotional aspect to it.
And this happens sometimes.
I mean, there are people on the right who reject hypotheses to do with global warming because they're afraid that if they accept those hypotheses...
Government power will grow enormously, and what they're opposing is government power or not, right?
And these are just tendencies and trends that we need to be aware of within ourselves so we can look more objectively at the data to know our own biases, which we all have, which is kind of why we need philosophy, right?
You need nutrition because some of the stuff you want to eat ain't that good for you, right?
Squid eyeballs, though.
Fantastic.
In a shot glass with pepper vodka.
We need nutrition because our taste buds don't always lead us to the best food for us, and we need philosophy because we have emotional biases that can complicate our consumption of empirical truths.
So it's just something to be aware of, because especially when you do fear, uncertainty, and doubt without taking the time to find the actual flaws in the arguments or the data that is being provided, all you're revealing is your own emotional discomfort, which in the realm of spanking comes from your natural We're good to go.
