Cause and Effect in Populations

I have noticed a trend that people use when making claims involving large populations and cause and effect…we generalize these claims. We make claims that if you do a then b will happen for example if you drive drunk then you will get a DUI and go to jail. Even though we know this is not necessarily true, there are plenty of cases when people drink and drive and don’t get caught. What we are doing when we make these generalized claims about a population is called cause in populations. The textbook says that “cause in populations is usually explained as meaning that given the cause, there’s a higher probability that the effect will follow than if there were not the cause” (Epstein, 320). The example the text provides is about smoking causes cancer. Like the DUI example this is not always true, but inevitably if you smoke long enough cancer will happen and if you drive enough times drunk you will get caught.