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kreelman • today at 2:23 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Is this whole article (the article in this Hacker News post, to be clear) an example of

   "Correlation is not causation"  ?

Replies

christina97 • today at 5:25 AM

No, because no correlation was proved. It’s just a flawed methodology.

tjwebbnorfolk • today at 2:51 AM

The strength of the correlation might be the only useful single variable we can have in discussions like this.

I'm starting to think that "Correlation is not causation" is a kind of slippery slope toward a world where nobody can ever prove the cause of anything. At the same time, just about everything is at least a mild carcinogen including food, the sun, air particulates, etc. But knowing that everything causes cancer isn't useful information. Knowing the strength of the correlations of each of these things is actually useful.

Without correlation, what are we left with?

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