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by imurray 5924 days ago
Not sure why the parent was downvoted. It's a perfectly reasonable criticism of the editorialized title of the submission. The actual article uses "associated with an increase" rather than "increases".
1 comments

The editorialized title of the submission may have its problems, but "Correlation != Causation" and equivalent statements need to be consistently downvoted because they, as on every other site where they have for a while now been equally if not even more overused, have become the lazy man's catch-all content-free retort.

Much of what we take as certain once started with observed correlation. This trend of immediately and automatically discounting observed correlations will likely do more harm than good over time, as one would be hard-pressed to hypothesize and later prove (or at least fail to disprove, in the scientific sense) causation if one's habit were to always blurt "correlation != causation" in the face of new information.