The Difference between Correlation and Causation
Did you ever take a quack medicine and right after you started feeling better and you decided, against your better jusdgement that the quack medicine really worked and proclaimed it on Social media to whoever wants to hear? This is called causation. Besides the placebo effects and other psychological effects which are powerful recovery tools, chances are that your body was already recovering on its own, but because your intake of medicine preceded your recovery, you decided that the quack medicine was the cause of your recovery. Yes, there indeed was a correlation between your recovery and the quack medicine intake, but there was no data that showed causation that the medicine caused your recovery. Let’s look at Casuation and Correlation:
According to Google:
Correlation in statistics is the measure of the degree to which two variables move in relationship to each other.
Causation refers to the idea that an event leads to a specific outcome.
The world is full of example of people mistaking correlation and Causation starting Social Media, the Media itself misreading data and assuming a causal relationship where there is only correlation
When a scientist sees a correlation he or she starts hypothesizing why something is the way it is. The scientist formulates a question and a hypothesis, but doesn’t assume causation. The Scientist will have to devise a testing mechanism to see if there is causation and if the hypothesis is right or wrong. To prepare for the testing phase, the scientist will have to remove all bias from teh study. He or she is not trying to prove themselves right, but rather aims to find out the truth gleaned from the data the experiment will yield. Once Casuation has been found, the data and the thesis will be published and peer reviewed before it becomes a Scientific fact or a proven theory. Peer review is essential to good Scientific testing because it purifies the process from all bias that would skew the results.
Social Media has been essential for people to have their voices heard, unfortunately, we still live a little bit in the dark ages where a vast number of the population does not know the difference between correlation and causation, causing many skewed views and fake science to emerge and become detrimental to our growth as a society. When we elect presidents that claim boastfully that they “never red abook in their lives”, this can lead to our society to slowly slip back down to the dark ages where sorcery, witchcraft, manipulation of the masses was prevalent.
