I’ve seen this referenced a lot, especially with psychology, but can someone explain what exactly it means? How does correlation not imply causation? Sometimes, does correlation ever imply causation?
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two things can happen in some manner that brings them “close”, like happen closely in time, but that doesn’t mean that one causes the other. as an example, the number of films Nicolas Cage has participated in correlates with the number of people drowning in swimming pools… does this mean that one of those causes the other? also cheese consumption correlates with the number of people who died tangled in their bedsheets… again, it’s not very likely that one of those causes the other.
you can see a whole bunch of such things at https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations.
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