toddo, 17 days ago

<social scientist rant> For the love of god, stop saying “correlation is not causation” as if it’s a grand revelatory statement that invalidates everything. Of course correlation isn’t causation. It’s CORRELATION. Correlation is its own thing; it can manifest in a full range between strong and weak; and opens up key questions about why two (or more) things are correlated. If things are correlated that means they are hooked together in some way for some reason statistically. And that matters in its own way. If X and Y are correlated, but X doesn’t cause Y, who cares? They’re CORRELATED. So the next question is Why? How? Causation is not the only thing that matters. </social scientist rant>