Meditations and Learnings

Meditations and Learnings

Questionable Cause

cum hoc ergo propter hoc
Assuming that the association of two things means that one caused the other. This is one of many examples of our pattern-matching brains failing us in a complex world.
It is for this reason that in science it is often stressed that correlation does not mean causation. Like many fallacies it has resulted in great harms, amongst them being the assumption that homosexuality causes AIDS, or that vaccines cause autism.