>the most important reason for the program’s success was that it dispensed with a reliance on causation in favor of correlation Is this necessarily so? I see a

>the most important reason for the program’s success was that it dispensed with a reliance on causation in favor of correlation Is this necessarily so? I see a lot of good old-fashioned factors mentioned in the article: converting data to a common format (locations as Cartesian coordinates), transforming expert knowledge into computer code (the inspector's insight about the brickwork), and even pure and simple political clout (obtaining several institutions' complete data dumps). It's not like all these mountains of data and expert knowledge were open-sourced and both "causationalists" and "correlationalists" had a run at it. Sure, the head of the program attributes it to his belief in correlation over causation, but there are many other and arguably more important factors present here.