Many years ago, a newspaper in the United States published such a full-page advertisement: Survey shows that buying a typewriter can improve a person's academic performance. Even if we assume that the survey in this advertisement is true, it still has different interpretations: for example, students who buy typewriters and get higher academic performance tend to come from richer families, and such families are more important to students' learning. Concern; students who bought typewriters were more motivated to study than other students.
That is to say, there is only a correlation between buying a typewriter and improving academic performance, not a causal relationship. However, in daily life, people often confuse the two.
There is a South Korean variety show "Talent Discovery Group". This show is mainly to discover young talents from all over South Korea. These children of different ages have very high IQ and EQ. After many episodes of the program, people discovered a rule: the parents of these excellent children are often older than the parents of children of the same age. Does that mean children born to older parents are smarter?
There is also no causal relationship between elderly parents and outstanding children, but a correlation. Parents are older, and the family situation is relatively better. Middle-aged children will devote more energy to their children's education. Rich social experience makes them more wise and patient in education investment. It is these reasons that enable them to raise better children.
In the 1980s, a team led by Brian McMahon, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, found a strong link between coffee drinking and pancreatic cancer, suggesting that if people stopped drinking coffee, the risk of pancreatic cancer would increase. The incidence rate will be greatly reduced. They published the research results in the world's top medical journal "New England Journal of Medicine".
McMahon's study compared hospitalized patients with pancreatic cancer to patients with other illnesses who were ordered by the same doctors, mostly gastroenterologists, and many hospitalized patients without cancer gave up coffee because they Fear that coffee will make ulcers and other gastrointestinal problems worse, and patients with pancreatic cancer did not stop drinking coffee, which made more coffee drinkers in pancreatic cancer patients, so it is not coffee that causes pancreatic cancer, but other diseases Causing others to stop drinking coffee.
Such examples of confusing correlation with causation abound in life. For example, many health magazines tell us that people who eat vitamin pills regularly or drink vegetable soup every day will live longer. In fact, people who can take vitamin pills regularly or drink vegetable soup every day have healthier living habits. They pay more attention to health preservation in diet, exercise, work and rest, while those who are not so particular will also ignore healthy habits in other aspects of life .
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