> What was the substance? You said you were throwing a wrench into the cogs of a brain that only mindlessly repeated things. OP wasn't mindlessly repeating, but

> What was the substance? You said you were throwing a wrench into the cogs of a brain that only mindlessly repeated things. OP wasn't mindlessly repeating, but bringing up a valid point, albeit not going into as much detail as I'd like. Ah fair enough. So there's often repeated phrase that "correlation doesn't imply causality". That's because often times people make the fallacy of going "A and B always happen together, therefore A must imply B!" (or the other way around). This is obviously wrong. So some people have learned that whenever someone says "A and B always happen together, so maybe one implies the other...?", they can shout CORRELATION DOESN'T IMPLY CAUSALITY and shut down the conversation. But the truth is that these people for the most part don't understand that phrase very well, right? Because you take conclusions in your life, right? Science has learned many things about the universe, right? So SOMETHING must imply causality. _If it isn't correlation, what is it?_ Think about it, everything in life is correlation. If you open your hand and the stone drops, did the stone drop _because_ you opened your hand? How can you ever know? All you know is that two events "opening hand" and "stone dropping" are correlated, how can we know if one implies the other? But of course we know, don't we? ;-) I think this is a substantive observation :P > You accused someone of not knowing what they were talking about and using phrases they didn't fully understand, and I didn't see any evidence that that was the case. Well, he didn't know the answer to the question I posed before. His answer was "I am very very educated, you go read some books." To me that's plenty of evidence he doesn't know the answer. In fact, I would say telling someone "correlation doesn't imply causality" is strong circumstancial evidence to that effect :P EDIT: If you say that saying "correlation doesn't imply causality" is bringing up a valid point, it must be the first time you see that phrase, am I right? Go on reddit and in every single conversation you'll see someone throwing that around as an excuse to not having to dig further.