choutos @choutos@qoto.org

How to decrease likelihood of experiencing illusions of correlation or causality:

- Knowing when and how to use skepticism and critical thinking skills.
- Relying on scientific methods that can assess causality.
- Learning how to think scientifically.
- Be vigilant and detect your own interpretations of causality.
- Understanding the importance of controlling for extraneous variables.
- Staying informed about potential alternative explanations for an event.
- Understanding that causality cannot be assessed by quick intuition.
- Actively or passively observing the effects of removing or reducing the perceived cause of an outcome.
- Attempt to complete information of instances when perceived causes and outcomes co-occur and do not co-occur.
- Running an experiment to test the effects of one variable on the outcomes of the other variable.
- Distancing ourselves from situations in which we are personally involved.
- Allow objective or neutral observers to help judge for causal relationships.

#skepticism #science #criticalthinking

**Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced**

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00888/full

*Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated.*

*We cannot think of a better safeguard against the illusions of causality than scientific thinking, which involves skepticism, doubt, and rigorously applying scientific methods, particularly the experimental approach.*

- How to Assess the Illusion
- The Probability of the Outcome
- The Probability of the Cause
- Cause-Outcome Coincidences
- Maximizing the Outcome vs. - Testing the Causal Relationship
- The Cost of Action—Secondary Effects
- Depression
- Personal Involvement
- When There are Several Potential Causes
- Aversive Conditions: Just the Other Way Around?
- Developing an Educational Strategy

#bias #science

*Both the hardware and software design is focused on respecting the end user’s freedom and giving them control over their privacy and security.*

https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-mass-production-phone-has-begun-shipping/

This #NATURAL TRICK can #CURE YOUR #CANCER

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_a181Xkla4

For the sake of completeness:
https://blog.jacopo.io/en/post/apple-ocsp/

Kids, please use #Linux (or *BSD).

<https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/>

*It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it.*

[Book] **Evidence-based software engineering**

From the book itself:
*This book discusses what is currently known about software engineering based on an analysis of all publicly available software engineering data. This aim is not as ambitious as it sounds because there is not a lot of data publicly available.*

*The analysis is like a join-the-dots puzzle, except that the 600+ dots are not numbered,some of them are actually specs of dust, and many dots are likely to be missing. The wayforward is to join the dots to build an understanding of the processes involved in buildingand maintaining software systems; work is also needed to replicate some of the dots toconfirm that they are not specs of dust, and to discover missing dots.*