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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7473531" data-attributes="member: 42582">Scientific navigation is another example of correlation without knowledge of causation.Scientific navigation depends on knowledge about compass needles pointing north; about the motion of the sun in the sky; about the keeping of time by clocks.I don't think reliable clocks can be built without knowing quite a bit about causal processes within a bit of machinery; but the motion of the sun in the sky, and how that correlates to differences in the time at which noon occurs at different longitudes, can be known without knowing what causes the earth to rotate about its axis at a uniform rate; and one can know that compass needles point north without knowing how magnetism works, or why the earth has a magnetic field - the discovery that the earth's core includes a lot of iron happened much after the use of compasses in navigation had been systematised.Central to the scientific method is the systematic generation of measurable results, and the ordering of those results so as to enable knowledge - by generalising from them, by determining the conditions under which they permit reliable predictions, etc. Identifying patterns of correlation is a very important part of the scientific method.An example of the application of scientific method, including the use of statistics, to social rather than natural scientific problems, is demography and related fields (eg public health and epidemiology). This generates systematic knowledge about life expectancies, patterns of morbidity and mortality, etc. It does not have to generate knowledge of causal processes (and there's an argument that it cannot, give that the causal processes - such as transmissions of pathogens from individual to individual - don't operate at the population level).Of course one can see bad arguments made in public health, because they rest on a conflation of correlation with causation - to put a really crude example, which is perhaps an unfair exaggeration even of the worst arguments, the fact that highly educated people are in the top quartile for life expectancy and low morbidity doesn't mean that if (somehow) everyone achieved those levels of population we could level the population up to those standards (given eg that now we would have people with PhDs working in mines, and thus exposed to risks of workplace injury and death that at present are faced only by those with lower levels of education).But that doesn't mean that the statistical information that such arguments draw upon is not knowledge, or that the generation of that information is not science.</blockquote>

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