Statistics and Philosophy
3 Beautiful Real Life Correlations
Transform your perception with these 3 real life correlations.
What is correlation?
Correlation is a measure of association between two variables. You can find positive, negative and no correlations in the universe.
Correlation is something that data scientists deal with, in their day-to-day lives. Let’s dive in!
Correlation 1: Time spent in meetings vs your value at the workplace
If you spend the majority of your work time in meetings, then most probably you are very much valuable to your company. This may not be the case every time, but I’m speaking in a general sense. Meetings are meant to bring up ideas, strategies and decisions that will influence the future of your firm. So this is no place to have fun. So, if you are enlisted in almost all the meetings of your firm, you can be certain that your company trusts your communication skills and creative inputs — you are really valuable to your company.
Thus, we can say there is a positive correlation between the amount of time you spent in meetings and your value at the company.
Implications
You can analyze how valuable you are compared to another person in a different firm holding the same designation as you. You can analyze on a weekly basis, whether your meeting duration is rising or falling or remaining nearly the same — which means, is the company’s perception about you changing in any way; positive or negative? Also, you can also work out the opposite manner, if you know your value at your company, you can anticipate your meeting duration in the upcoming week or month. To go even further, you may even be able to predict the designation (value) of someone in your firm or a different one, given the time they spend in meetings.
Correlation 2: Boiling point of Water vs Time elapsed
Water is a chemical and boiling point is one of its property telling us at what temperature it starts to boil. There’s something known as colligative property — property of a solvent will be influenced by solute contained in it. The pure water (not talking about distilled one but the one with natural minerals in it) will possess a particular boiling point. While, as the water starts getting less and less pure i.e more impurities starts to populate the drinking water, the boiling point of water rises — a phenomenon known as Elevation of Boiling Point, one of the colligative property. If the boiling point of water from a river near your home is higher than what you measured yesterday, then you can start suspecting the river water quality.
Since drinking water should have a consistent quality, its chemical properties (boiling point, in this case) should show a constant boiling point or there should be no correlation of Boiling point of water with time.
Implications
A positive correlation between boiling point and time elapsed will be quite alarming as it is an indication of inclusion of impurities — at this point, you must investigate the reason. Maybe a local factory is dumping their untreated industrial waste into the river. You can find a locality or country that cares the most with their rivers or water bodies by comparing the correlation values between each country — the one with least correlation wins, as they put in place great management efforts to preserve the water quality for a long time.
Correlation 3: Wisdom vs Overestimation
Finally, we all have heard the adage “With Age Comes Wisdom” and there’s a study led by Frank Durgin, demonstrating that fact [1]. In that study, the participants were asked to estimate the slant of a hill and the study showed that older participants gave much better estimates than the younger ones — even though some of the older ones didn’t have any specific knowledge about hills. Thus, older ones are much better estimators than younger ones, as the study proved and they attributed it to experiential knowledge (or wisdom) of adults compared to the younger ones. Also, it should be noted that almost all the younger participants and some of the older ones (outliers) gave overestimates.
Therefore, we can say that wisdom is negatively correlated with overestimation i.e the more wisdom you have the less likely you are to make a wrong decision or estimation.
Implications
Negative correlation between wisdom level and degree of overestimation proves you will be more accurate in your decision when you are very old. But here’s the good news, depending on the accuracy you want (or the corresponding degree of overestimation), you can know the corresponding level of wisdom you need to acquire from the regression line. If wisdom is an attribute of the aged ones alone, then we would not see any young influential leaders across the globe. This indicates that young people too can gain the level of wisdom, the same as that acquired by the adults. What does this mean? To youngsters, this means you will make less wrong decisions than your peers and you will be successful within short time-frame relative to your peers because you are very good at judging things due to the high level of wisdom you acquired recently. Note that the time-frame reduction does not apply to the effort that goes in — in fact, it will be something humongous as your goal is to achieve the extra-ordinary, to be honest, so determination and passion should be your best friends. Remember that adage, “No pain, No gain”?
So, look at the regression line and find the level of wisdom you need to gain and start gaining it. But how?
Read as much as you can, Explore different domains of knowledge, Interpret your experiences, Discuss your ideas and Debate your views.
Basically, what you have witnessed is the power of a simple concept in Statistics. I will be soon exploring even more powerful ones in the most simple way possible. Stay Tuned !
P.S: Share this article if you found this helpful and let those in need be enlightened as well.
