trickybeck the Sly wrote:
gbaji wrote:
It's also worth pointing out that of those prominant elected officials who have recieved Rhodes scholarships Democrats outnumber Rebulicans 14 to 4.
It's far more likely that the primary requirement for recieving one is that you espouse political beliefs that tend to be more common in the Democratic party then in the Republican party.
Nice try.
Correlation does not imply Causation. Go psych 101Eh? I think you need to take that class again. Correlation certainly
implies causation. That is the basis of inductive reasoning after all (which you might learn when you take logic 101). "Correlation does not
define causation" is a much more accurate statement.
What's interesting is that the very body of work in which you are arguing this statement relies on that very concept. In psych studies, we might look at the behavior of a person suffering from schitzophrenia. We can certainly identify a set of behaviors common to the ailment (correlation). However, we can't state that because someone exhibits those behaviors that they are
definately suffering from schitzophrenia (cause). We can only say the reverse. Oddly, it's based purely on that set of behavior that a psychiatrist will have to make a diagnosis as to whether someone is, in fact, schitzophrenic. We can only state probabilities really. "Most people who exhibit these symptoms are suffering from schitzophrenia" is accurate. We can never say that "All people who exibit those symptoms suffer from schitzophrenia". It's still a very useful and valuable tool though.
We can look at the correlary and infer a cause. We do it all the time. However, the key when looking at those correlations is to understand that they are not absolute. Just becuase we have 100 specific examples of a particular cause resulting in a particular event does not guarantee that every time that result occurs it was that cause that did it. Inductive reasoning, by definition, has that limitation. However, as long as one expresses his conclusions in less then absolute terms, it's still accurate.
Here's the logic.
Given: There are four primary criteria for becoming a Rhodes Scholar. One requires a particular academic achievement. One requires a level of athleticism. One requires an ambition/ability to become a leader. And one requires a set of specific social/political beliefs.
Given: All politicians presumably have a desire/ability to become leaders, whether Republican or Democrat.
Given: There's no evidence that Republicans or Democrats are more likely to be athletically inclined.
Given: There's no evidence that Republicans or Democrats are inherently more likely to have high grades during their undergraduate studies.
Given: Out of the body of prominant politicians who were awarded Rhodes Scholarships, Democrats outnumber Republicans 14 to 4.
We can reasonably state that out of the four criteria for a Rhodes scholar, the only one that could possibly account for a discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans is the social/political differences. Note, that there could still be other factors. Perhaps Republicans just don't want to go to Oxford as much as Democrats? Perhaps the curriculum/atmosphere at Oxford is more likely to result in someone becoming a Democrat? Who knows? However, we have no data on those points. We're just comparing various criteria for being a Rhodes scholar and determining which is the most likely factor for why a Democrat would be one but not a Republican, so those are irrelevant.
Thus. We can state that there is a
good probability that some part of that criteria tends to weed out future Republicans and favor future Democrats.
We can state with absolute certainty that when comparing two politicians, the fact that one is a Rhodes scholar in no way assures us that he is "smarter" or even more academic then the other. Academic quality is only one of the criteria and isn't even that high a standard.
We can also state that there is a much higher probability that a politican who was a Rhodes scholar will end up being a Democrat then a Republican.
How or why that happens is irrelevant to this issue. You can't just point at a Democrat who is a Rhodes Scholar and assume that he's more intelligent then a Republican who is not. That does not mean that the Democrate isn't smarter then the Republican in this case, but you can't make that conclusion from the scholarship alone. To make that assumption would be horribly flawed logic of the worst kind.
