News headlines often compress complex science into a simple storyline: If two things are happening at the same time, one must ...

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 ...

There are a lot of SEO studies out there, but not all of them are made equal. Here's how to decide if X is really affected by Y, or merely a coincidence. Every so often the SEO community will erupt ...

Data purists would rap my knuckles for asking this question and reply, "Never". On the other hand, "data sophists" who're accustomed to lying with Big Data in even more crude ways would wonder, “Duh, ...

Much of the time, people derive causation from correlation. Put another way, when two odd circumstances seem to align with one another, people assume that one causes the other. Such logic simply makes ...

The oft-repeated mantra that correlation does not imply causation is not always effective. The media, the general public, and even scientists themselves, are often guilty of seeing cause-and-effect ...

One hundred fifty world leaders, with President Barack Obama as the prime mover, and hundreds of their aides and hangers-on, gathered in Paris for an event called the "2014 United Nations Climate ...

If you read a lot, like me, you might notice almost daily there’s a new study that contradicts some earlier research. Something causes cancer — then it’s good for you. You know the drill. What’s going ...

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 ...

CORRELATION, CAUSATION, AND BLOGGING....Kieran Healy is annoyed: You only have to hang around the world of social science research- or policy-related blogging for a few hours before you come across ...