Quotes About Correlation

There seems little correlation between poverty and honesty. One would rather expect the opposite; dishonesty may not always pay but surely it sometimes does

When something happens, something else always happens.

Where there's fire, there's smoke.

Every mental state is also physical.

Material causes and emotional effects are not to be arranged in regular equation.

In general, the longer the average member of an ancestry group has been in America, the more likely he or she will become fully socialized to our high-consumption lifestyle. There is another reason. First-generation Americans tend to be self-employed. Self-employment is a major positive correlate of wealth. TABLE

There is no significant correlation between the make [brand] of motor vehicle you drive and your level of happiness with life.

Interestingly, within the high-income population, I find that there is a negative correlation between one's grade point average and the amount one spends on motor vehicles. Those with the very highest grades tend to spend less on motor vehicles. This by no means suggests that people you see driving $100,000 cars all flunked out of college!

the fact that crime and poverty are correlated is automatically taken to mean that poverty causes crime, not that similar attitudes or behavior patterns may contribute to both poverty and crime.

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten

Substantial empirical evidence indicates that individual differences in thinking dispositions and intelligence are far from perfectly correlated. Many different studies involving thousands of subjects have indicated that measures of intelligence display only moderate to weak correlations (usually less than .30) with some thinking dispositions (for example, actively open-minded thinking, need for cognition) and near zero correlations with others (such as conscientiousness, curiosity, diligence).

Slavery and rebellion are inseparable correlates. Hence, rivalry for power and exaggerated distrust pervade the entire organism from top to bottom.

Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which "similar" things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.

In Operations, many of our data sets have what we call 'chi squared' distribution. Using

Enough anecdotes make a pattern.

The hand is the visible part of the brain.

We have this idea that extroverts are better salespeople. As a result, extroverts are more likely to enter sales; extroverts are more likely to get promoted in sales jobs. But if you look at the correlation between extroversion and actual sales performance - that is, how many times the cash register actually rings - the correlation's almost zero.

Diversifying sufficiently among uncorrelated risks can reduce portfolio risk toward zero. But financial engineers should know that's not true of a portfolio of correlated risks.

You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation.

Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive.

we are not made to view things as independent from each other. When viewing two events A and B, it is hard not to assume that A causes B, B causes A, or both cause each other. Our bias is immediately to establish a causal link.

Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to the rise of education—not an optical illusion. We

I wonder why people don't realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon

Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it