this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
414 points (95.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43898 readers
1175 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is this related to correlation is not causation?
Correlation at least tries to imply they're related. As lottery sales go up in your household so does credit card debt. Not always a cause but they're related
You're looking for spurious correlations which is when numbers have no business even being used in a comparison
I mean, they are related. There's a common causation (higher temperatures). There's plenty of spurious correlations but this specific example isn't it
yes
Not exactly. What you're looking for is coincidence.
But correlation is sometimes caused by coincidence.
Do you have an example? I'm pretty sure correlation cannot be caused by coincidence.
Coincidence is describing two things happening at the same time but with separate causes. Correlation is describing two things having a common cause.
Here you go: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
First thing you learn in a statistics course is that correlation doesn't equal causation.
Correlation: two thing happening at the same time or one thing happening right after the other, regardless of whether the things are at all connected
Causation: one thing happening BECAUSE of the other
~~Oh yes I got my definition of correlation slightly wrong. Correlation doesn't necessarily mean that two things have the same cause but they do relate in some way either by having a common cause or by occuring in the same system. They definitely have more in common than happening just at the same time or right after each other like a coincidence.~~
~~I didn't claim that correlation equals causation and I hope you didn't get the impression because this would be oviously wrong.~~
Edit: I stand corrected and today I learned that "correlation" means that two things have a statistical relation without any causal relation implied. There can be a causal relation but it's not necessary. The key takeaway for me is that correlation describes a statistical relationship.