States with Faster Internet Access Have Smarter People | Hacker News Reader

States with Faster Internet Access Have Smarter People

highspeedinternet.com

17 pointssharkweek11 comments

Particularly egregious reversal of correlation and causation.

I didn't read an argument for causation in the article, did I miss something? The title just states a fact: states with Faster Internet have smarter people. The biggest assumption I saw was that higher ACT scores = smarter. The author even speculated that investment in infrastructure as a value may be causing both.

It's in the very first paragraph:

"Despite several doomsday claims that the Internet is breeding a generation of morons, new analysis suggests the opposite may be true."

An uncontrolled correlation does NOT suggest the opposite is true.

The rest of the article is better though, and allows for various causes.

Isn't there causation implied in that title anyway? Compare it with "States with smarter people have faster internet". The smart people were there first.

I don't think it is implied. I can't come up with a sentence with the same information and zero implications.

This got downvoted, but I believe the comment is correct. Technically, as stated, the headline does not imply causation. It's like saying "cities with declining crime have declining rates of microsoft internet explorer usage".

That's probably true for most cities. The way I phrased it does not imply causation.

What's the difference between the two sentences? The first one presents a situation where causation seems plausible to us, so we infer it automatically. Whereas, causation seems implausible between crime and IE, so we don't read my sentence as implying causation.

Our brains are wired to automatically see causation if it seems plausible and there's a correlation. I teach the LSAT, and this is one of the topics tested.

Normally, the testmakers go to great lengths to disguise what they're doing. But on causation/correlation questions, they just present the correlation. They know we're so bad at it that the question will fool people without any other special tricks.

See, I've wondered for quite a while whether the internet qualifies as a 'brain boost' device. Does a person on the internet do better on an IQ test? How much better?

That's one thing people have argued as the cause behind the Flynn Effect - basically our IQs have gone up in the last 20 or so years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Of course it could be any number of things at this point. I disagree with any educational reform theories, but I think the internet and the elimination of lead are the two most likely.

It's documented since 1930, so I doubt its the internet. If you include radio and TV then it would make sense.

I've always felt limited by the connection speed or hardware. I sometimes feel like I can think faster, but I have to wait for some page to load or some app to open (especially when my company uses outdated hardware and still on Office '03). Hopefully some day we'll only be limited by the "speed" of our brain.

Or maybe these states have faster internet access because they had the smarter people to begin with?

But yeah, correlation is not causation.

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