Don McMinn

A town hires a new sheriff and in the next three years the theft rate drops twenty-five percent. In appreciation of the reduced theft rate, the city council votes to give him a hefty raise. But are they confusing correlation with causation?

Perhaps the theft rate is down because thieves have been so good at stealing that there’s not much left to steal so they have moved to another town. Or perhaps an aggressive salesman has sold theft deterrent systems to most homeowners. Or perhaps the judge has increased the punishment for theft so it no longer pays to be a thief.

False causality is a mental shortcut—it’s lazy thinking—that can lead to bad decisions. Instead of taking the time and effort to look beyond a simple relationship (new sheriff—lower crime rate) we often just assume they are linked by cause and effect. 

Instructional designer Archana Madhavan brings clarity to the difference between correlation and causation. She writes:

“While causation and correlation can exist at the same time, correlation does not imply causation. Causation explicitly applies to cases where action A causes outcome B. On the other hand, correlation is simply a relationship. Action A relates to Action B—but one event doesn’t necessarily cause the other event to happen.

“Correlation and causation are often confused because the human mind likes to find patterns even when they do not exist. We often fabricate these patterns when two variables appear to be so closely associated that one is dependent on the other. That would imply a cause and effect relationship where the dependent event is the result of an independent event.

“However, we cannot simply assume causation even if we see two events happening, seemingly together. One, our observations are purely anecdotal. Two, there are so many other possibilities for an association, including:

• • • The opposite is true: B actually causes A.
    • The two are correlated, but there’s more to it: A and B are correlated, but they’re actually caused by C.
    • There’s another variable involved: A does cause B—as long as D happens.
    • There is a chain reaction: A causes E, which leads E to cause B (but you only saw that A causes B from your own eyes).”

So don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t make a connection where none exist. Take the time to think through all effects and consider what prompted them.

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Here’s an interesting and helpful article titled Asking One Simple Question Can Entirely Change How You Feel

Last month, my HR department asked me to write an incident report about an event that happened at work. In the report I wrote, “I was standing in the break room when Ken and Nancy walked in.” In Ken’s report, he wrote, “Nancy and I were in the break room when Don walked in.”

So, who was right? Upon deeper reflection, I was wrong. My memory—even of a recent event—was inaccurate.

But I’m not the only one who succumbs to this human fallacy—we all do. Our memories are riddled with inaccuracies. 

Ulric Neisser was a German-American psychologist and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the “father of cognitive psychology”. His primary area of research was about perception and memory. In 1986, the day after the Challenger space shuttle exploded, he asked his students to write a paper about when and how they learned about the disaster. Three years later, he interviewed these students and asked them to recall what they had written. Less than seven percent of their comments correlated with their initial submissions. Fifty percent of their recollections were incorrect in two-thirds of the points and twenty-five percent failed to match even a single detail. One student had first written that she was in her apartment when she heard the news; three years later she said she was at work. One student had written that he was with friends; later he was sure that he was by himself.

When President Lincoln died, his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, allegedly said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” But James Tanner, a young soldier who was asked to take notes of the last hours of Lincoln’s life and who was in the room at the time of this death, wrote that Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the angels.” Was it ages or angels? It’s hard to know. Read here for an in-depth discussion of this interesting conflict of recorded history.

Perplexing, isn’t it? How should we respond to mankind’s unstable and fallible memory? 

For starters, don’t be so cocksure about what you remember. You’re probably often wrong. Secondly, be skeptical about other people’s recollections. When someone recounts an experience, hold it loosely.

“No one thing is the cause.” Tolstoy, War and Peace 

We live in a tumultuous world. Inflation is out of control, the war in Ukraine, Covid refuses to go away, severe famine, extreme climate, and Kroger’s is out of my favorite sausage. Serious, complicated problems. And each problem affects the others.

There are no simple answers to these complicated problems because they are multifactorial. When seeking solutions, our tendency is to take a mental shortcut and look for one cause. But there is no single cause.

We have the same tendency when analyzing successes. It’s convenient and seemingly efficient to identify one reason why the United States is a strong country, or why Djokovic won the 2022 Wimbledon tennis tournament, but there are many reasons for these successes. There is no single cause.

Resist quickly coming to singular causes. Take the time to identify multiple reasons something has happened.

• • • Approach everything in life as multifactorial; everything is complicated and interconnected.
    • Most issues are progressing; factors are constantly changing.
    • Don’t be too confident or smug about your conclusions. At best you’re probably not seeing the entire story; at worst, you’re wrong.
    • Don’t discount other people’s thoughts and explanations. They too, have trouble seeing all the pieces, but they may see a piece that you don’t.

 Life is complicated; if we want to see it clearly, we need to embrace its complexity.

On a completely different topic, here’s a good article on How to Have Better Arguments. 

Do we learn more from failure or success?

We can learn from both, but the most valuable lessons come from studying successes.

Here’s why: In most situations, there are multiple ways to fail, but few ways to succeed. When you study failure you may learn what won’t work but not discover what will work. 

It’s also wise to try to duplicate a success experience before you invest heavily into adopting its fundamentals and scaling it up. The initial success may have been a one-off, or you may be confusing correlation with causation.

When studying success, look for basic fundamentals and avoid small, unique factors.

Also, learn from successful people. If you’re interested in investing your money, learn from Warren Buffet. He’s the most successful investor of all times. Don’t rely on the guy on radio who’s droning on and on about how to invest.

Herein is a “shortcut” to success—study and emulate successful people.