September 2019
Intermediate to advanced
240 pages
4h 15m
English
Sometimes someone will try to persuade you that two pieces of data are related. They’ll even show you charts and graphs to prove it. And often they’ll be right – but not always. As a skilled critical thinker you won’t take this at face value, will you? You’ll pick it apart to make sure the correlation is real.
Stage two of the argument is to reason that, if these two things correlate, there must be a causal relationship between them: one must cause the other. A genuine example of this would be that the more people smoke in a given group, the higher the incidence of lung disease will be. That’s because, as we all know, smoking causes lung disease.
You might be more surprised to learn that the rate of divorce ...