A.B. Hill’s rules for judging causality adapted |
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Description for lower side |
Evidence |
Description for upper side |
what is the absolute size of the effect ? |
1. Strength of association |
regularity of issue be in an individual or a group ? |
have the effect been observed in other studies ? |
2. Consistency |
potential to compared alternative ? |
is the cause associated with one or a few specific effects ? |
3. Specificity |
potential for crecruiting or engage other processes ? |
do the results occur after the cause ? |
4. Relationship to time |
reproduction in space ? (non correlated) |
is there a dose or quantity related response ? |
5. Gradient in the scale of complexity |
breaking points ? |
is there a known more fundamental mechanism supporting cause ? |
6. Plausibility a more fundamental lower level of complexity |
is there some higher utility ? |
does all the evidence fit all together ? does all the evidence fit with natural history ? |
7. Coherence of evidence |
complementarity of evidences, fullfilling potential ? |
is the evidence the result of a planned experiment ? |
8. Experiment |
generality of the function, unreproducibility of the form (diversity) |
is the observed result similary to other disease or drug effects ? |
9. Reasoning by analogy |
is the result of the natural or artificial experiment find it’s specific space ? |
do te results satisfy elementary rules of logic, data collection, etc. ? |
10. Common sense |
does the result satisfy curiosity and creativity ? |
Source: anfm |