• SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Wait, I don’t think you understand the gravity of what you’ve just suggested: autism caused Pluto.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Look man when I was a kid Pluto was a planet. Therefore Pluto will always be a planet.

      This mental inflexibility on my part may be related to autism, but I will never admit it.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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        5 months ago

        Look at it this way. Pluto didn’t change, we just changed the definition of a planet to exclude it from the cool kids club because if we included it we’d also have to at the very least invite Eris too, and nobody likes Eris (hence the Trojan War).

      • Comment105@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Pluto was created to be destroyed, and it’s destruction would make autistic people reveal themselves plainly.

    • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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      5 months ago

      No, you got it wrong. Autism exists since like forever. It’s the diagnosis that caused Pluto.

  • Wxnzxn@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    The knowledge of Pluto causes autism, clearly it is an elder God cognitihazard.

      • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        No, the opposite; it’s a classic example showing that correlation doesn’t necessitate causation. I was just playing with the phrasing to imply the humorous inverse that there is a casual link.

        • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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          5 months ago

          No, the opposite; it’s a classic example showing that correlation doesn’t necessitate causation.

          Right, but ice cream sales and shark attacks have a shared cause, and it’s the weather. Humans both get in the ocean where they are shark-accessible more often and also buy more ice cream when it’s hot out.

          Basically causation is X->Y. But there are other relationships between X and Y, and in the case of ice cream sales and shark attacks it’s W->X and W->Y (one doesn’t cause the other, but they are caused by the same thing). It’s also possible for two things to correlate without any connection whatsoever, because sometimes things just happen to move in the same directions at the same times for a while.

          People have trouble dealing with that, and much magical thinking arises from X and Y happening together being believed to necessarily mean X and Y are connected in some fashion because humans are very good at building patterns even when they don’t exist.

          That’s literally where the vaccines cause autism thing started from - kids start showing clear signs of autism at about the same age they get several vaccines. The guy who originally proposed it with a deeply flawed study was only specifically claiming it was the combined MMR and not all vaccines generically and produced his study in an attempt to sell a separate MMR series that could be spaced out (rather than being one shot with all three) which would allegedly prevent the effect, because he would directly profit from his vaccine series being used instead of the combined MMR.

          • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Whether there is another cause that is common to both events is irrelevant to the example. The example is to demonstrate the fact that while A and B are correlated, neither A causes B nor B causes A are true predicates. Just like the discovery of Pluto and autism diagnosis are correlated to start around the same year, there’s no evidence of the casual link where discovering Pluto causes autism diagnosis or autism diagnosis causes Pluto discovery.

  • lobut@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    The thing with jokes like these and Birds Aren’t Real and Russel’s Teapot and stuff is just that we don’t believe in them and the people that do believe in the vaccine cause autism BS is that they do fervently do.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Thousands of people suddenly start staring into the night sky, exhaustively cataloging everything they see, and writing long journal entries arguing over whether a vague flickering dot is a planet or not.

    And you think Pluto caused Autism?