The rooster thinks he summons the sun because the sunrise always follows his crow. Correlation, at its worst, is a very confident rooster. For decades, our data economy has run on the same illusion: ...

Correctly distinguishing between correlation and causation is critical because it influences how treatments for illnesses are devised and tested. Also, in the context of the law, it ensures that as ...

Kwon is a Ph.D. student in health policy at Harvard University. Stuart is professor and chair in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It is human ...

Russell has a PhD in the history of medicine, violence, and colonialism. His research has explored topics including ethics, science governance, and medical involvement in violent contexts. Russell has ...

Most of us have heard the phrase “correlation does not equal causation”. But understanding how scientists move beyond identifying correlations to establish causation remains a mystery to many. Finding ...

A comment posted by a reader on a recent post reprimanded me for suggesting that marijuana caused relationships to go bad. In this instance the reader was mistaken, as I had specifically used the word ...

News headlines often compress complex science into a simple storyline: If two things are happening at the same time, one must be causing the other. Tylenol causes autism. Ultra-processed foods cause ...