Jess is feeling a bit torn:
I’ve been reading a lot of the online columnist Vox Day. Although I think he confuses correlation with causation much of the time, I really can’t argue with a lot of his observations. One of his favorite topics is feminism. The gut reaction I have is totally opposite his views; however, every life experience I’ve had says that he is right. I’m still digesting this one. He’s a completely sexist guy, but every time I think that he’s saying something completely unfair, I can’t provide any memories or experiences to the contrary.
The reason Jess is feeling confused is that reality is finally beginning to catch up with his social conditioning. This is the socialization that the public school advocates are concerned about homeschooled children lacking, because they aren’t interested in a child’s ability to play nicely with others, but rather with his unthinking acceptance of the Officially Approved Views. Most people, being untroubled by logic, don’t have any problem with witnessing one thing and believing another; you have to be in the habit of actually processing the information you receive in order to detect anomalies in the first place.
And before you feel too smug about your own better grasp on reality vis-a-vis men and women, note that this indoctrination doesn’t apply merely to feminism, but to everything from the legal system to the nature of the money in your wallet.
As for his correlation/causation statement, if there was one rhetorical device I would remove from the Great Unwashed, this might be it. People use this all the time, apparently because they are under the mistaken impression that it is some sort of rebuttal. “You’re confusing correlation with causation” they say, despite offering absolutely no rationale for this supposed confusion, never mind the fact that a) Y didn’t happen before X, b) it was publicly predicted that if X then Y prior to X, c) in other situations where Y did not happen, there is no X, and d) there is a logical and reliable relationship between X and Y. And so forth. In these cases, it’s an unconscious admission of adherence to the Accident Theory of History, where nothing happens for any particular reason and all events are unrelated… a theory to which only the historically illiterate subscribe.
The value of any model is its predictability. The fact that we can view historical events with the precision of hindsight does not mean that predictive models of the past are worthless, it means that we can use the ones proven to be correct to distinguish between causative and correlative relationships.