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SatanicNotMessianic t1_j85vvnm wrote

Reply to comment by pheisenberg in Family of Oakland baker seeks 'restorative justice' for her death following robbery by IAmNotARobot124

That’s not how statistical analysis of correlation works. If chewing tobacco causes oral cancer rates to soar by a factor of ten, it doesn’t matter if only 35% of chewing tobacco users get oral cancer.

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pheisenberg t1_j88xt7w wrote

If your output variable is “#cancer in large population”, yes, an increase in tobacco use rate causes it to go up. I don’t think that’s true of crime, though. Not every recession causes a jump in crimes rates.

But I was talking about the output variable “Does person X commit a crime?” For that, most of the time poverty will not cause crime. There must be many other factors involved such as community relationships, opportunity, values, likelihood of going to prison, etc.

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