Mike Rinder's Blog

Something Can Be Done About It

Correlation Without Causation

By 75 Comments

Scientology loves to claim they are responsible for “Clearing the planet” and “bettering society” — proclaiming they are “slaying the four modern horsemen of the apocalypse, drugs, illiteracy, criminality and immorality.”  They routinely take credit for all sorts of things: reducing crime in Colombia by 50%, increasing literacy rates in third world countries, eradicating gang violence etc. They find a statistic and then claim “we handed out 74,000 copies of WTH and the number of divorces in Denmark is lowest in a decade. ”  It is clear (in their minds) that this is incontrovertible evidence that “WTH solved divorces in Denmark” and “we are making a better society thanks to the IAS and COB”… This scenario is repeated in every scientology major event ever held. (They ignore their role when the divorce rate goes back up  — that of course is the psychs at work).

This is what is known as correlation without causation. Less eggs were laid in Georgia last year than the year before. More red M&Ms were consumed than ever last year. Thus eating red M&Ms causes chickens not lay eggs. This is scientology “logic”.

Scientology also loves graphs – though they often have no numbers on them and are not verifiable in any way.

So, here we have the latest example of both correlation without causation and bizarre “graphs” – with a twist.

Here is the twist.

These people are so incapable of critical thought that the graph they are promoting “proves” that the ideal org has had absolutely no impact on yearly crimes. If this unscaled graph is to be believed, you must UNDO your ideal orginess and crime rates will continue to go down.  Just revert to a hole in the wall with no staff or public, rather than a grandiose empty building with no staff or public. Becoming ideal has resulted in crimes committed not improving since 2011. In fact, in 4 of the 7 years it’s actually worsened.

And this is something you are proud of.

Perhaps this is the explanation for the horrific crime that took place right in your ideal org with a Bentley-driving sword wielding man shot dead by police?

You have been suspiciously silent on the subject. Where is the STAAD League decrying this “hate crime” that was “caused by Leah and Mike”?

Must have been one of your own…

 

UPDATE:

This just in. IAS Freedom Medal Winner Meghan Fialkoff has single-handedly convinced 72% of all New Yorkers are “opposed to pushing marijuana” (whatever that means?)

Just for shits and giggles this is from a 21 June article:

 

 

Friends, WE ARE WINNING! Thanks to your support of the IAS. So hand over some more money…

Comments

  1. 72% of New Yorkers… oppose pushing marijuana into our city…

    I would LOVE to see what the question really WAS. Her re-statement of it was semi-incomprehensible & could be taken two diametrically opposed ways. I’ve been keeping tabs on the cannabis-legalization and de-criminalization topics for a while and have come to see that Weed got a bum rap for political and racist reasons all those years ago, at the time of “Reefer Madness”, when blaming all the ills of society on blacks was not only condoned, but admired in some perverted way.

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  2. Well, the graph shown for Inglewood had the years shown, and a couple of milestones for the org, which is a start. They’re showing a trend, but WHAT are they counting? Number go times the Twit® extorted $$ from his sheep?, number of dollars stolen? Number of times they claimed that TWTH actually DID something? I don’t believe that last one is downtrending; that’d be a BAD thing in their minds, I expect.

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  3. Maybe we could kill them with cognitive dissonance. Just tell them the lowered drug use or lowered crime rate or lowered admittance to a mental hospital were because the psychs were doing a good job. Then watch them run screaming from the room holding their head from exploding from the cognitive dissonance!

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  4. Jeez Laweeze, they can’t even get their quotes right. It should be: “If I can make it there, I’m gonna make it ANYWHERE…”

    Idiots. It was so damn easy to look up that quote. But then, I don’t have to be frightened of running into “entheta” on the innerwebs – thank goodness for intellectual freedom.

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    • Briget: “If I can make it here, I’m gonna make it ANYWHERE…”

      If they can make it UP here, they can lie anywhere.

      It’s all fake; why do we care, anyway? A: Watching the evil empire eat its own whales’ tails IS sorta humorous, as is their thoroughly magical thinking which most of us abandoned at an early age.

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  5. The irony is that they also deny ACTUAL causation. For example, they pressure couples to divorce, thereby increasing the divorce rate for Scientologists; pressure women to get abortions, thereby increasing the abortion rate; and pressure people to spend their college funds on Scientology services and donations, thereby decreasing the rate of education and critical thinking. So in addition to taking credit for accomplishments that were unaffected by them, they refuse to take responsibility for the negative effects they in fact did cause.

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  7. Maybe a bit off topic but here’s a link to a photo of the fleecewinds docked in St Lucia I found on Google Maps. I zoomed in and panned around but noticed no one, not one person is on the boat. Not on deck anywhere or on the gang plank or dock. No public or even crew. NOBODY! Sign of the times?

    https://www.google.com/maps/place/Castries,+St+Lucia/@14.0101094,-60.9874687,3a,25.6y/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipOHO60B3phulSQG7GsNf_iP2Yj7sfTIziWI8TFD!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOHO60B3phulSQG7GsNf_iP2Yj7sfTIziWI8TFD%3Dw203-h152-k-no!7i4032!8i3024!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x8c406065f12da31d:0x6e7486c4e8399df5!2sSt+Lucia!3b1!8m2!3d13.909444!4d-60.978893!3m4!1s0x8c4067a838a6d44f:0x3afffd5e87c58b99!8m2!3d14.0100288!4d-60.9875107?hl=en&authuser=0

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    • Glenn,

      As far as nobody visible, that’s just a sign of the times in scn: NO ONE HOME!

      Reply

    • ValR, that mint have some logic behind it: decriminalize or legalize Cannabis and all sorts of positive things can happen, like reducing the drag on society that the prisons are, allow the police to concentrate on actual crime, that sort of thing. Just don’t ever expect scientology to follow any logic particularly any one which ignores their PHOBIA of drugs of any sort; they’re ALL BAD, don’cha know?

      Reply

  9. I remember being told those kinds of stats back then yet I would look around see a tiny group of people who had problems and were exhausted!! I was exhausted. Cognitive dissonance trying to figure out where ARE all these wins? 🤔😙😉

    Reply

    • It’s simple—all the wins were achieved by every other org. Only we were the failures. Little did we know that every other org thought the same. If you don’t compare notes, you don’t realize you’re all in the same boat.

      Reply

    • mwesten, Nice find.
      I’m not sure whether I’m more impressed that you knew the site off-hand or that “tylervigen” felt the need to compile those correlations-which-don’t-show-causaton. I expect “tyler” was an academic, student or professor, who had time on their hands and/or grad students not doing anything important. It’s amazing what you can find on the Interwebz, isn’t it?

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      • Haha, indeed! I bookmarked it a while ago whilst venturing down a climate science rabbit hole. Most amusing! 😆

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  11. First, any group that says they’re opposed to “immorality” generally is not to be trusted. At all. There couldn’t be a bigger red flag.

    Second, I think the traditional “horsemen” are still every bit as prevalent. War, famine, pestilence, and death haven’t gone away. (Death will never go away, of course.) But that’s high control groups for you: Redefining common concepts so their members can’t interact normally with the outside world any longer.

    How on earth is illiteracy “modern” anyway? We’re a far more literate world than ever before. And Scientology antivaxxers are empowering old-fashioned pestilence.

    Scientologists claiming they cause divorce rates to go down is particularly rich. Scientologists divorce like they swear.

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  12. It sounds like she’s trying to say that 72% oppose NYC being taken over by the pot shops like some other cities have been. Although people in the state of New York as a whole might be marginally for legalization, most people don’t want those stores popping up on every corner in their backyard. They’re an eyesore and people don’t want their kids around that. But as always, when Scios try to use regular human language, it’s cumbersome.

    Even her exhortation to “put the ball in the end zone” is kind of strange. Nobody who watches football would say that. You might say “carry the ball into the end zone” or “get to the end zone” or something like that, but most of the various ways a ball can land in the end zone don’t result in scoring.

    All their propaganda seems to be poorly worded and slapped together in just a couple of minutes by people who generally don’t understand what they are writing, using figures and images they’ve googled without giving them a thought.

    Reply

    • There’s not actually much difference in opinion between NYC and the state as a whole:

      “Just 52 percent of city dwellers support legalization, compared with 55 percent of suburban voters and 59 percent of upstaters.”
      Majority of New Yorkers back use of recreational marijuana
      https://nypost.com/2019/06/10/majority-of-new-yorkers-back-use-of-recreational-marijuana/

      My guess is that perhaps 72% oppose letting corner bodegas sell marijuana, or something like that – along the lines of your NIMBY suggestion – and of course Scientology has twisted that unrecognizably in their propaganda.

      Reply

    • MarcAnon,

      They’re simply uneducated in real [“wog”] schools. Dwarfenführer blew from an excellent high school, JUST as it was starting to get really interesting. But NO!, no one could teach David ANYTHING he didn’t already know better than the teacher.

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  14. This stat thing was always impressive. And is impressive. The example with Wth and denmarks divorces is quite good and funny and shows a bias in our thinking.

    This bias is used on a lot of advertisings so we biassed daily because accounting and real stats is not a business of a brain.
    There is a nice blog called: “you are not too smart”

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    • Oh no!!! Sounds like it’s time for Freedumb of Metal winner Megan Faikoff (sp?) to step in and single hand this Hill 10 flapping flap and head down to Times Square with a pallet full of ‘way to happiness’ pamphlets to stop the reefer madness taking over New York. Go Megan!!!!!!!

      Reply

  17. Meanwhile, Miscavige is hiding out in one of his secret bat caves dodging process servers now hunting him. Little Coward!

    Reply

    • True. I noticed this in my last years of the cult. It was obvious, that the staffs went more stupid. But this did not bother me, as i thought, over the ocean, there are the better cultmembers.
      Only than i got experiences with the sea org i started to think. The similarity to nazi fascism and stasi was too obvious. Also the brutality. So i had to go or better run.

      Reply

  19. Denmark’s epic expansion started with the distribution of 74 THOUSAND! way to happiness booklets, disseminating more than 3.5 MILLION! pages of LRH tech, containing more than 1.5 MILLION! moral precepts, spread over 112 MILLION! square inches of paper and over 148 THOUSAND! staples! Donate to WTH foundation TODAY!

    Reply

  20. I came home the other night and the garage was cleaned up and the lawn was mowed. I first thought it was because my son was home from college but now I think I need to drive around the neighborhood to see if a Scientology Ideal Org was built somewhere. That would be a much better explanation since my son is very hard to motivate.

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  21. It’s kind of funny. Besides having atrocious English skills, Scientologists can’t even read their own nonsensical graphs. According to THEIR graph; there was a drop in the crime rate for one year after their Org. opened but then 3 years of increasing crime rates, and then a big drop from 2009 – 2010 BEFORE THEIR ORG WENT ‘IDEAL’, and then several years of increasing rates immediately after going Ideal. So, logically, a community’s crime rate can be decreasing but as soon as you open a Scientology Org or the Org goes ‘Ideal’, that community’s crime rate will increase!

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  22. The annual crime stats from the Inglewood Police are completely different than the cult’s graph. The Police Department numbers do NOT support the cult’s claim that crime dropped by 65% (per their graph) when they opened the idle org. Here’s the police department numbers that show only a 16% drop in crime from 2009 to 2011. NEVER believe the cult’s PR shit. NEVER.

    2000 4,675
    2001 4,654
    2002 4,127
    2003 4,374
    2004 3,765
    2005 4,176
    2006 3,987
    2007 4,045
    2008 4,037
    2009 4,085
    2010 3,529
    2011 3,422
    2012 3,478
    2013 3,481
    2014 3,533
    2015 3,465
    2016 3,313
    2017 3,570
    2018 3,427

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    • I played around with making some graphs with those numbers, and it looks like Scientology’s using the same numbers — they’re just using “no axis labels tech” to make the drop look much more dramatic. In the Scientology version of the chart, the Y axis starts at 3200 instead of 0.

      Reply

      • I played with giraffes as well but they kept falling off the pages. Oohh…maybe I should have tried graphs instead.

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  23. Search on ‘humorous correlation without causation’ and you’ll find an entertaining series of ‘correlations’.

    https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/hilarious-graphs-and-pirates-prove-that-correlation-is-not-causation

    “In the case of pirates and global warming, take a closer look at the labels on the x-axis. Notice something strange? Apart from the fact that the proportions of neighboring data points are all out of whack, there is also the issue that a couple of them have been humorously disordered to deliberately deceive.”

    Yes, the lack of Pirates is causing Global Warming. That statement is born out in the numbers. Just like every number and bogus graph in the $cieno lexicon.

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  24. Increasing literacy rates in 3rd world countries? Holy Cow! Their own people cannot even write English sentences without filling them with all kinds of spelling and grammatical errors.

    When it comes to the English language, these people seem to have one of the lowest rates of competency in English Composition. They seriously need to go back to elementary school and retake the basic English Language Composition courses.

    I see they try to make their own members redo all the exercises associated with their own courses. But given their own impoverished competency when it comes to English Composition, I believe they need to send their own members back to the basic English Composition courses as taught in Public Elementary Schools.

    Talk about the pot calling the kettle names! IMHO, these people are self-confessed imbeciles.

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  26. Wait a minute here. Every Sunday morning, i take my dog for a walk in the desert. When I come back, my next-door neighbor’s lawn has been mowed. Do you mean to tell me that these two have no correlation? 😉

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    • Seeing you looking at their lawn as you walk by with your dog spurs your lazy neighbors to action. Well done on keeping their ethics in on the Fifth Dyn, Val.

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    • There COULD be a correlation. For instance, your puppy might be phobic of the lawn mower, scaring the neighbor’s mowing person, so they wait for you to get far enough away before starting the evil machine.

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  27. In my opinion, the environment of a cult is partly responsible for all of these mental mistakes in causation. When I was in, I was constantly reading items written by Hubbard which made Scientology look like the best thing that ever happened to society. When dedicated people got together there usually was a reference to reinforce the benevolent nature of Hubbard and Scientology. Even all of the hand clapping after graduation contributed to a worshipping of Scientology and Hubbard. In New York in the 1970’s, I remember talking to people around the org and the mission. One time in New York a SO member told me how a SO member dropped his body and Hubbard was there immediately with his e-meter to “stabilize the thetan”. You get the point where you do not know what to believe. Am I in a delusion? Is this Scientology for real? Some people fall for the ideas and join the SO or become dedicated members. These people will lie and do anything to promote Scientology. Another time in the 1970’s I met a guy who claimed that Hubbard was the Buddha in his past life. My good friend who left the Sea Org around 2008, said “What keeps people in Scientology is that they desperately want to believe in Hubbard. They need someone to believe in.”

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      • I lost my internet connection but I will try to reconstruct my response. Thanks for the wonderful words. I am very thoughtful today because fifty one years ago I was drafted into the United States Army. After a tour in South Korea during the Viet Nam War, I went behind the “Iron Curtain” in Russia for three months. When I returned to the United States after rejecting communism, I ran into Scientology in New York. It seemed like a nice alternative but it took me seventeen years to get out of it after OTVIII. There were at least five other cults operating in Greenwich Village at the time when Coffee shops originated. It is ironic that Blavatsky’s New York residence from her 1890’s stay in New York was only a few blocks south of the Scientology mission. Little did I know at the time that Hubbard just stole her viewpoint and altered it to fit his deranged ideas. I could have saved myself a lot of time and money. But that is why I am thoughtful today.

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    • Possibly there is such a thing as “the power of faith”. Notwithstanding WHAT someone really believes. My late mother’s close friend married at 21. For 13 years she did not become pregnant. Tests showed there was nothing wrong with her or her husband. She wanted children very much. She was a Roman Catholic but not particularly devout. A friend suggested she do a Novena to one of the saints (please excuse me, I’m not Catholic and I’m recalling this from having been told all this 50 years ago.) She figured what the hell, she had nothing to lose. Anyway she did a Novena and shortly thereafter became pregnant. After the birth of her first baby she did more Novenas and had 2 more kids – 3 in 5 years. This, after 13 years of married, unprotected sex (her husband was RC also). Something obviously happened to her body. She told me it was the Novenas. What can one say to that? Possibly, the concept of “putting herself in God’s hands” allowed her to stop “trying” so hard to become pregnant and to just relax? Look, I don’t know and I’m not one for magic, particularly Biblical magic.
      Back in ’88 I was told (as were we all) that the release of OTVIII was what brought down the Berlin Wall. I always considered that something of a stretch 🙂

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      • I was Roman Catholic and we said 300 Hail Mary’s if we wanted change. I chanted at the local Buddhist temple every Friday night for fourteen years. People on the blogs would mock that effort. However, as I explained, the chanting is not prayer. It simply relaxes a person.

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        • “It simply relaxes a person.”

          Yes, I think that’s it!

          One adapts the concept of a higher power having a hand in controlling one’s fate. A higher POWER. There’s some “thing” more powerful, guiding, controlling, because one is AGREEING that first, there IS a higher power, and, second, that this higher power MIGHT be able to do something…so one relaxes…and it happens.

          I’m just theorizing here.

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  28. The big Scientology shrink is causing.
    Less illiteracy.Less young scientologist who rarely know how to spell)
    Less criminality less reges fleecing less dupes and driving them into bankruptcy or scams.
    Less insanity because there are fewer dupes to disconnect from less family
    Less drugs. Number of Koolaid drinkers keeps going down down

    Reply

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