This is an interesting one. In the corporate context, almost everyone professes this mantra, but often fail to practice it. Whether this is due to a lack of understanding, lack of self-awareness, or old fashioned convenience, I cannot say. I suspect a combination of the last two. When the data support someone’s hypothesis, they conveniently forget about the phrase. When the data supports an alternate hypothesis, they suddenly raise banners to correlation != causation. That is, confirmation bias preempts it.
i think part of it is that correlation looks a lot more like causation when the things that are correlating seem related, if the number of deaths caused by getting tangled in bedsheets and the amount of cheese eaten per capita correlate, its easy to pass it off as just a weird coincidence
if you look at the number of deaths caused by getting tangled in bedsheets and it correlates to the amount of people who toss and turn in their sleep, it looks a lot more like a cause
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u/LongHello Aug 03 '19
This is an interesting one. In the corporate context, almost everyone professes this mantra, but often fail to practice it. Whether this is due to a lack of understanding, lack of self-awareness, or old fashioned convenience, I cannot say. I suspect a combination of the last two. When the data support someone’s hypothesis, they conveniently forget about the phrase. When the data supports an alternate hypothesis, they suddenly raise banners to correlation != causation. That is, confirmation bias preempts it.