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Everything is correlated (2014–23)
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
The general factor of socioeconomic status or ‘S-factor’ also applies across countries as well: economic growth is by far the largest influence on all measures of well-being, and attempts at computing international rankings of things like maternal founder on this fact, as they typically wind up simply reproducing GDP rank-orderings and being redundant. Now our general background knowledge in the social sciences, or, for that matter, even “common sense” considerations, makes such an exact equality of all determining variables, or a precise “accidental” counterbalancing of them, so extremely unlikely that no psychologist or statistician would assign more than a negligibly small probability to such a state of affairs. …Considering the fact that “everything in the brain is connected with everything else”, and that there exist several “general state-variables” (such as arousal, attention, anxiety, and the like) which are known to be at least slightly influenceable by practically any kind of stimulus input, it is highly unlikely that any psychologically discriminable stimulation which we apply to an experimental subject would exert literally zero effect upon any aspect of his performance.
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