Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them… — John Allen Paulos
Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most.
p. 159Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe.
p. 44
The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place.
p. 37
There surely is something to these terms, but too often they’re the result of minds intent on discovering meaning where there is only probability.
p. 62

