Correlation and causation

Humor, Statistics 1 Minute

In my statistics classes, I try to emphasize to student that correlation is not the same thing as causation. Still, the following two graphs are absolutely brilliant.

Number of Pirates vs. Global Warming

Conclusion: If you want to stop global warming, we should all become pirates.

piracy01

green line

12220131541148

Sources: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/wp-content/piracy01.gif and http://iwastesomuchtime.com/on/?i=64193

 

Published by John Quintanilla

I'm a Professor of Mathematics and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas. For eight years, I was co-director of Teach North Texas, UNT's program for preparing secondary teachers of mathematics and science.

Published

One thought on “Correlation and causation”

  1. Pingback: Correlation and Causation: Index | Mean Green Math

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.