No, it is not strong evidence. It is only evidence of a correlation which is meaningless. You shouldn't loath those thoughtless chants, you should embrace the

No, it is not strong evidence. It is only evidence of a correlation which is meaningless. You shouldn't loath those thoughtless chants, you should embrace them. The first thing someone should say when presented with "linkage" is think, that is meaningless on its own. The real problem is that there are so many scientists (people with the ability to conduct statistical analysis) and so much data, that every possible correlation is being discovered. Even correlations that have nothing to do with anything. The best examples come from Finance, where the data has been more attainable, and where the rewards for finding real causality have been available longer and allowed for advanced computations on super computers before we all had excel (or put more useful statistical tool here). One of the go to papers on Motley Fool's completely loosing stock selection strategy is here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=158409 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=158409 There are lots of papers and examples in finance where people tried to find causality, but really only found correlation. Doing so is the best way to loose a ton of money. It is also the best way to get people to do stuff you do/don't want them to do and it is the best way to stop progress. So, don't make assumptions about causality, you should provide real evidence of causality beyond correlation if you write the word linkage.