A long time ago in a town far far away, and every place I’ve been since then, I’ve seen this line: “correlation does not imply causation”. And myriad variations thereof.
I hate this sentence. Hate it hate it hate.
Because it *does/i] imply causation. Which is, in fact, all it does. It doesn’t prove causation, but it does imply it. It also usually implicates several other things, maybe even reverse causation. Some of these things may be true, some of them may be false. Rarely, all implied things are true or all of them are false. In the former case, the result was blatantly obvious and the scientists just needed to spend some grant money this year. In the latter we either boned the entire study or learned something totally unexpected from the results.
Sigh. Sorry about that. Pointless rant. Just an annoying thing people do. I suppose I do it, too. For exmple, I love twisting a normal phrase: “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” into this: “I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.” I think I actually heard that one off Scott Adam’s Dilbert newsletter. I think its funny, and every time I say it, the other person does a quick-double take and them we both have a laugh over it.
It depends on how you’re using “imply.” In mathematics, “A implies B” means “If A is true, then B is true,” so under that definition correlation does not imply causation.
I’ve often seen it phrased as “correlation does not equal causation,” which is more clear and more obviously correct. I suspect the version using “imply” might be a corruption of this.
I agree with Borschevsky; correlation does not imply causation. It offers the possibility of causation, sure, but that’s not implication. Apart from anything else, correlation is a reflexive relation, while causation isn’t, so correlation couldn’t possibly imply causation except in a reflexive frame. At best you might say that there’s a 50% chance of causation, given correlation, but that’s still ignoring the possibility that there might simply be a common and unexamined cause for both variables, so it’d mostly be completely wrong.
On the other hand, we can be confident that the sentence “correlation does not imply causation” does in fact bother the pee out of you, so perhaps we can compromise on the fact that the correlation between this sentence and your peeing is in fact causative in nature?
I know causation is a word, but I’ve always heard that phrase with the word “causality” and so this thread is bugging me like an itchy tag in a shirt you can’t take off.
That’s all, I have nothing to contribute to the actual discussion. I just wanted to popp in and say “Correlation does not imply causality.”
If so, it was likely ripped off of a Jimmy Buffett song, which was probably ripped off from some other source.
Jimmy Buffett
Burn That Bridge
From - Riddles In the Sand
*
I’m not saying I’m scared of you
But your love is something new
When I hold you we’re swaying in the wind
Of all the bridges I’ve ever crossed
High and lonesome and wild and lost
I feel this time I’ll take it to the end
We don’t care what the people may say
If there’s a price it’s the price we’ll pay
Chorus:
And we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it
Burn that bridge when we come to it
Burn that bridge when we come to it
Burn it down
Burn it down *
I usually say “We’ll drive off that bridge when we come to it.”, and then the conversation switches into a discussion of Senator Kennedy, for some reason…
