The best set of infographics ever

At Bloomberg Business Week, Vali Chandrasekaran makes me incredibly happy by creating a series of six infographics demonstrating the ridiculous connections you can make when you start confusing correlation and causation. Did a conspiracy of baby Avas cause the U.S. housing market to implode? Was Michele Bachmann's candidacy doomed by the end of Staten Island Cakes? Are scientists raising the global average temperature in order to increase their own research funding? Find out here!

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: big rules • damned lies • facts • lies • Science • statistics

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The Snowden Principle

http://twitter.com/zerosonico ZeroSonico / djNatch

Ava Adore! Oh, noes!
Snig

http://xkcd.com/552/
Wild Rumpus

Don’t forget the relationship between pirates and global temperature! *ramen*
tylerkaraszewski

Oops. My daughter’s middle name is Ava. Sorry everyone.
Todd Tavares

Ava is the lagging variable. I think you have causation reversed
gibbon1

One the other hand if I hear another pencil neck or proto-neck beard remind me of that I’m going to lose it. All it does is betray the utters snug ignorance.

It’s very very simple. If your observability is crap, your correlations are also crap, just noise. No big astounding insight there. If however your observability is good then your correlation(s) represent a signal, data, whatever. If you have extremely good observability then a single solitary observation may be iron clad proof of whatever.
- MinistryOfInfo
  
  Yes, you have ironclad proof of an observation. Causation, on the other hand, remains entirely unproven.
professor

What about the correlation between infographics and internet stupidity?
- cultandpaste
  
  or the underconsumption of unneccesary crap and economies of fail
http://twitter.com/jbhelfrich jbhelfrich

Anyone want to place bets on the time until some right wing mouthpiece references this BW article as evidience that scientists are increasing the global temperature to increase their research budgets?
scatterfingers

The only word I can think of to describe the name “Ava” is the word “gauche”.

It’s spoiled by association for me, thought.
Bodhipaksa

I’m not up on statistics, but none of these graphs indicates to my untrained eye the slightest hint even of correlation. Comments from statisticians, please?
Øyvind

I never trusted her.
karger

The dangers of pedagogy: I decided to
play with Google correlate to show how correlation is different from
causation. I downloaded personal spending on durable goods from data.gov http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=9&step=1 and asked what search terms correlated. Top result (correlation 0.93): “orchard credit card”:
Durable Goods Personal Expendiatures – Google Correlate
sgtdoom

There’s correlation and substantive and pertinent correlation, such as the several recovered black boxes from those aircraft involved in the 9/11/01 attacks, thanks to persistent FOIA requests from the Pilots/911 organization, which clearly demonstrate that no hijacking ever occurred (aircrew cabin never having been breached as the black boxes track opening and closing of various doors on aircraft.

Now that’s correlative.