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Step Five: Determine if Causes Are Sufficient and Necessary
To see how these rule checks work in RealityCharting® go to
http://coach.RealityCharting.com/Book/Advanced-Rules.
Correlations Are Not Causes
Almost every day we hear some new report or read some news
article about some scary comparison, like “Another indicator of global
warming is that in the past 100 years, damage from hurricanes has
steadily and significantly increased.” These simpleminded arguments
come from seemingly intelligent people, but they have no causal basis.
In 1949, Dr. Benjamin Sandler released a book in North Carolina that
stated polio was caused by consuming ice cream and soda. The basis
for his claim was a direct correlation between the consumption of
these products and the incidence of new polio cases. He went on to
describe some bizarre causal connections between the ice cream and
the nervous system, which again had no evidenced based causes, only
more correlations.
Correlations do not constitute a causal relationship, only evidencebased
causal relationships do. The reason damage from hurricanes has
increased over the past 100 years is that more people live near the water,
caused by an ever-increasing standard of living which allows us to spend
more money on homes, levies, and canals, which further exacerbate
flooding by preventing the natural flow of water into the river deltas
and wetlands. While it is possible that global warming could cause more
hurricanes, there is no causal evidence to support this notion. To closecouple
the effect of “Increased Damages” as being caused by “Global
Warming” is an example of what Peter Senge observed, that most people’s
thinking is fundamentally flawed when it comes to cause-and-effect
relationships.
As for ice cream causing polio, luckily this idea didn’t go too far and
we developed the polio vaccine using cause-based science instead. Polio
is caused by poliovirus not ice cream or soda or calcium or any of the
other pseudoscience nonsense perpetuated by the media and Internet
quacks who thrive on ignorant people. Remember, the news media is a
multibillion dollar business and, like all business, their primary purpose
is to stay in business. They do this by selling stories and the better the
stories, the more sales they make. One way to sell more stories is to scare
us and using correlations instead of evidence-based causal relationships
facilitates this. Furthermore, as we learned in chapter one, storytelling
cannot effectively convey the causal relationships that are reality and this
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