One of my pet peeves: correlation ≠ causality.
If you are interested, there’s an excellent website called “Spurious Correlations” which finds strong correlations that have nothing to do with causing each other
One of the best: there’s a 99.2% correlation between “US spending on science, space, and technology” and “Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation”.
Listening to the AGW crowd, that’s enough to prove that US spending on tech causes suicide.
Today in the news we have this:
The National Institutes of Health have unveiled the findings of their study, finding that 13 Reasons Why has been associated with the spike in teen suicides.
Released earlier this week in the “Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry,” the results found there was a 28.9% increase in U.S. children between the ages of 10-17 that killed themselves in April 2017, one month after the series debuted.
However, that percentage is among boys, not girls.
Watch this important point that is buried in the story:
Professor Joel Greenhouse, a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and one author of the study, said that it’s important to note that researchers “cannot make a causal link” between the series and the sharp increase in youth suicide.
So just as the correlation between the rooster crowing and the sun rising doen’s prove that the rooster caused the sun to rise.