It'd be a lot healthier if malleable, hero-worshiping younglings could get their heads around the fact that sometimes their flawed, human heroes accomplish their greatness despite their outrageous flaws and not because of their outrageous flaws. Then we might end up with fewer kids affecting the asshole-ness, misogyny, alcoholism, or misanthropy of their idols thinking it will make them better programmers, writers, basketball players, or mathematicians.
But noooo, it's all "Linus did X, so I'll do X and be cool like Linus!"
It would have been more appropriate to have said "cooccurrence is not causation", because there isn't actually a correlation between personality flaws and accomplishment, just some notable cooccurrences.
>Unless you believe correlation is providing evidence of causation here:
In both cases, yes, it is evidence of causation. However the low prior probability of causation in each case massively overwhelms the evidence provided by observing a correlation.
Here's an easy way to tell if A is evidence of B: ask the inverse question - is "not A" evidence of "not B". If so, it is trivially provable that the answer is yes.
It'd be a lot healthier if malleable, hero-worshiping younglings could get their heads around the fact that sometimes their flawed, human heroes accomplish their greatness despite their outrageous flaws and not because of their outrageous flaws. Then we might end up with fewer kids affecting the asshole-ness, misogyny, alcoholism, or misanthropy of their idols thinking it will make them better programmers, writers, basketball players, or mathematicians.
But noooo, it's all "Linus did X, so I'll do X and be cool like Linus!"