• interolivary@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    People seem to severely misunderstand what that phrase means.

    It doesn’t mean that every scientific article that says “X causes Y” is wrong because that implies correlation and therefore can’t be the cause.

    It just means that you generally can’t say “X causes Y” if all you have is a correlation, and most people in eg. the environmental sciences actually do understand statistics better than the average member of the public whose understanding doesn’t really go further than “correlation is not causation.” So, no, correlation is not causation, but that’s probably not news to the researchers