Unless I'm mistaken, correlated means there is a relation. We don't know what the cause is, but we can see there is a relation. Meaning they at least appear to have something to do with each other. If we could show they have nothing to do with each other, they would no longer be correlated.
The cause of that correlation may not be what we think. Your link of "spurious" correlations has many examples. I would suggest there actually is a link between those things, but it's a 3rd factor of some sort. For example, the correlation between suicides and spending on scientific research may be correlated via a connection to prosperous societies. A society with more money will spend more on science. And there's lots of research to show that wealth leads to higher instances of mental health issues. So the correlation is real, but it doesn't mean one caused the other.
All of which is my long-winded way of saying I think there's tremendous value in these kinds of studies.
As I have said already in another reply to that post, what I mean is not all correlations are worth discussing. Obviously it has value from a scientific perspective but that doesn't mean it'll lead to any useful conversation. In fact it generally just seems to lead to insinuations and generalizations about large groups with little to no real evidence.
>I would suggest there actually is a link between those things, but it's a 3rd factor of some sort. For example, the correlation between suicides and spending on scientific research may be correlated via a connection to prosperous societies.
Edit: Not quite. What the graph is saying is there's a direct correlation between the how much the United States budget allocates to science, space and technology from year to year and suicide specifically by strangulation and hanging. There may be some vague link between suicide and science spending, but this is saying something much more specific than that.
> Unless I'm mistaken, correlated means there is a relation
Well the short rude answer is you are mistaken. The longer answer is that some correlated things have underlying causal relationships: one causes the other, vice versa, or a third unspecified correlate is causative.
But see that word some ? It's important. Because some are entirely unrelated, and the word correlated is not co-related in a causative sense. You might find piracy corollelates with consumption of potato chips. It doesn't have to mean anything.
The relation goes to trend: up or down. Positive or negative correlation. Why? The "why" kind of related, is different. Correlation is observed relationship, not functional, actual, causative relationship until a mechanistc reason is found, or it's absence is understood, and it's just.. pirates and chips.
The problem here is english. "Related" has different meanings.
> Correlation is observed relationship, not functional, actual, causative relationship until a mechanistc reason is found, or it's absence is understood, and it's just.. pirates and chips.
Be careful though: causal relationships exist where they do, and humans may not be able to find them and thus classify a causal relationship as merely a correlation.
I think correlation != causation misleads a lot of people on places like Reddit.
The cause of that correlation may not be what we think. Your link of "spurious" correlations has many examples. I would suggest there actually is a link between those things, but it's a 3rd factor of some sort. For example, the correlation between suicides and spending on scientific research may be correlated via a connection to prosperous societies. A society with more money will spend more on science. And there's lots of research to show that wealth leads to higher instances of mental health issues. So the correlation is real, but it doesn't mean one caused the other.
All of which is my long-winded way of saying I think there's tremendous value in these kinds of studies.