Paul Kaplan: Quoting Benjamin Disraeli, Mark Twain famously quipped, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In the field of investments, in which we rely heavily on ...
A comment posted by a reader on a recent post reprimanded me for suggesting that marijuana caused relationships to go bad. In this instance the reader was mistaken, as I had specifically used the word ...
Causation and correlation may sound alike but are very different. The former means the root of subsequent events, while the latter refers to an actual or apparent relationship between trends in which ...
One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten. – T. Sowell Correlations are often mistaken for ...
The rooster thinks he summons the sun because the sunrise always follows his crow. Correlation, at its worst, is a very confident rooster. For decades, our data economy has run on the same illusion: ...
Most of us have heard the phrase "correlation does not equal causation." But understanding how scientists move beyond identifying correlations to establish causation remains a mystery to many. Finding ...
Despite the chant that correlation is not causation, some researchers believe the design of scatter plots nudges us to the wrong conclusions. Can a change in their design lessen that risk? Analyzing ...
After reading Dalton Conley’s piece on recent developments in social-science research (“The Data in Your Lap: How to Interpret Naturally Occurring Experiments,” The Review, December 19), I can only ...
A comment posted by a reader on a recent post reprimanded me for suggesting that marijuana caused relationships to go bad. In this instance the reader was mistaken, as I had specifically used the word ...
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