Causality Vs Correlation Quotes & Sayings

The Feynman Dilemma
A diner says to a waiter, "What's this fly doing in my soup?" And the waiter says, "It looks like the backstroke." Yet if the same scene is viewed while plunging into a black hole at the speed of light, it will look like a Mickey Mouse lunch pail from the thirties, except that Mickey's head has been replaced by a Lincoln penny — Steve Martin

It gets better. It seems hard, you know, I think being different is always gonna be a tough climb. There's always gonna be people that are scared of it. But at the end of the day you give those bullies, those people, that are so ignorant, if you give them the power to affect you, you're letting them win. And they don't deserve that. What you're doing by being yourself is you're keeping it real, and you're being really brave. — Adam Lambert

Correlation does not equal causality. When two things travel together, it is tempting to assume that one causes the other. Married people, for instance, are demonstrably happier than single people; does this mean that marriage causes happiness? Not necessarily. The data suggest that happy people are more likely to get married in the first place. As one researcher memorably put it, If you're grumpy, who the hell wants to marry you? — Anonymous

I know no better way to show true patriotism and love for one's country, than investing to create wealth and employment. — Strive Masiyiwa

A great book seeks to explain causality, not correlation. It works to point out the circumstances in which it works, and where it doesn't. And in so doing, it is broadly applicable. — Clayton Christensen

To reduce the interpretation of the causality of all kinds of climate changes and of global warming to one variable, CO2, or to a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is impossible to accept. Elementary rationality and my decades-long experience with econometric modelling and statistical testing of scientific hypotheses tell me that it is impossible to make strong conclusions based on mere correlation of two (or more) time series. — Vaclav Klaus

New York City is a living organism; It evolves, it devolves, it fluctuates as a living organism. So my relationship with New York City is as vitriolic as the relationship with myself and with any other human being which means that it changes every millisecond, that it's in constant fluctuation. — Timothy Levitch

Something ELSE set your body in motion, sent an executive summary - almost an afterthought - to the homunculus behind your eyes ... that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as The person, mistakes correlation for causality, ... and thinks He moved the finger — Peter Watts

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary - almost an afterthought - to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you. — Peter Watts

There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. — Saul Bellow

Subjectively, a gnat doubtless feels that its span of a few days is a reasonably long lifetime. A tortoise, with its span of several hundred years, would feel subjectively the same as the gnat. Not so long ago the life expectancy of the average man was about forty-five years. Today it is from sixty-five to seventy years, but subjectively the years are faster, and death, when it comes, is always all too soon. — Alan W. Watts

My grandfather killed himself falling off the dike in Ostend while photographing my two cousins. This can happen so easily when looking through a lens: for a split second nothing else exists outside the frame. — Martine Franck

My head was spinning. I could think of nothing better to calm it down than the Oxford English Dictionary. — Alan Bradley

Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The whole life story of Jesus, on the human side, is the life story of One who lived by faith. — G. Campbell Morgan