I am a PhD student in applied mathematics at Princeton University. The number of people who drown in pools is highly correlated with the number of films Nicholas Cage appears in any given year. But if you avoided swimming pools in 2017 because Nicholas Cage appeared in a whopping 7 films that year, than you would be confusing correlation with causation. On the other hand, smoking does cause lung cancer and an observed correlation between the two provided some of the earliest evidence for this fact. I study Causal Inference: a field devoted to understanding when and how we can use statistics, like correlation, to understand causal relationships.
Let the battle between human psychology and science have statisticians' supervision
The truth is a needle in an ever-growing haystack. Scientists need better statistical education to find it
