I love the Internet – having just read Freakonomics, I can now make comments on the authors’ blog. Specifically on a post about something I was trying to dig out anyway – the link between nutrition and behaviour. You can find their post about it here.
Jon,
Social sciences and IT are full of examples of vague links, which are in fact a combination of loose statistical correlations (you can probably correlate anything with anything, such as crime rates and given names -but maybe because poor people give certain names and they’re more likely to offend if they live in a high crime area?) and fertile imagination.
Do you think Linux coders eat more tuna than Visual Basic ones?
Indeed – and that’s a point the two Steves make in Freakonomics. Worth a read!