Comment Re:Say it with me... (Score 1) 656
Exactly. The concept of "correlation is not causation" is actually a bit more subtle than a lot of people realise. Some people almost seem to think it means "if two things are correlated, then one CANNOT be the cause of the other", which is, of course, absurd.
The phrase should really be something like: "correlation is not absolute proof of causation, in and of itself" (if we side-step the issue of what "absolute proof" even means).
If two things are correlated, one *may* cause the other. It may not. You really need to do some investigation and see if there's a plausible mechanism linking the two. But if you've got some reasonable statistics to back up the correlation, it's probably worth at least looking in to it.