A few people on this forum could learn a thing or two from this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7592579.stm
"Whenever ice cream sales rise, so do shark attacks. As more economists are recruited to the Treasury, inflation rises. In his fifth lesson of a weekly series, author Michael Blastland gives hints about reading too much into "correlated" facts.
Lesson Five: Causation
The story: The smoking ban in Wales "caused" a 13% fall in heart attacks from October to December 2007, compared with the same period in 2006.
The flaw: The ban began in April. So did it also "cause" the rise in heart attacks in the first few months after the ban? And presumably it "caused" me to spill my tea. For that happened during the smoking ban too.
The lesson: This is a foolish case of a simple error - the assumption that things happening after an event must be caused by it."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7592579.stm
"Whenever ice cream sales rise, so do shark attacks. As more economists are recruited to the Treasury, inflation rises. In his fifth lesson of a weekly series, author Michael Blastland gives hints about reading too much into "correlated" facts.
Lesson Five: Causation
The story: The smoking ban in Wales "caused" a 13% fall in heart attacks from October to December 2007, compared with the same period in 2006.
The flaw: The ban began in April. So did it also "cause" the rise in heart attacks in the first few months after the ban? And presumably it "caused" me to spill my tea. For that happened during the smoking ban too.
The lesson: This is a foolish case of a simple error - the assumption that things happening after an event must be caused by it."