Is this whole article (the article in this Hacker News post, to be clear) an example of
"Correlation is not causation" ? "Correlation is not causation" ?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?
Mechanism. Testable causality. X causes cancer by doing y.
What can you do today that would cause cancer tomorrow or next week? Even next year? Nothing. Yet, just about every environmental thing causes cancer over long periods of time.
Which leads to the absurd: being alive causes cancer.
Yea..
A deer in a forest who heard the foot steps of a lion and thought "hey Correlation is not causation" would soon be a goner...
Saying 'Correlation isn't causation' doesn't disprove causation.
The strength of correlation is NOT the only useful metric and should not be mistaken for more rigorous statistical analysis regarding causality.