I have always been a staunch supporter of differentiating between these two concepts, correlation and causality. But recently I have come to the conclusion that confusing the two is at the root of most of the evil in this world. Evil, for all intents and purposes, is defined here as ‘ignorance and the actions inspired by it’.

All too often, people see a correlation between two things and assume a causal relationship exists when there isn’t one, like Sex Ed and having sex, for example. Many people see the correlation between Sex Education and having sex (mostly because they both have the same word) and assume causality when there is none. Becoming more educated about sex doesn’t cause sex, and having sex certainly doesn’t make you more educated about it. There is no causal relationship between the two, only a correlation.

Those individuals who say that teaching abstinence is the best sex education constantly confuse correlation and causality. Basically, Sex Education does have a causal relationship with safe sex. More specifically, sex education causes a higher percentage of the sex being had to be safe sex. But it does not cause more sex to be had, unless you count the sex being had when the people having safe sex outlive the diseased uneducated people having unsafe sex. But the abstinence preaching people refuse to make this distinction and, instead, willfully or unwittingly confuse correlation with causality.

But that’s just meant to be an example. I’ll go further into the sex education issue in another post.

Does X Cause Y, or Vice Versa?
Sex education is not meant to be the focus of this article. Correlation and causality are the subjects at hand. The sex education example is meant to illustrate one of the basic concepts in correlation. When we look at the relationship between two things, it is rather easy to see that there is some kind of relationship (correlation) between them. But it can be rather difficult to discern the nature of that relationship, like when you try to determine if it is a causal relationship or not.
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