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Message: <blockquote data-quote="triqui" data-source="post: 5526096" data-attributes="member: 57948">I mean that the sentence that the poster I was quoting, while being a sarcasm (he said it as irony), was, sadly, part of serious "thought" in some individuals. Correlation does not imply causation is not exactly the same that post hoc ergo propter hoc.Correlation implies that there is a relation between both premises. Although this relation is not strong enough to be sure there is a causation. For example: there is a correlation between being tall, and playing well to basketball. Tall people tend to play better basketball, and basketball players tend to be tall. The relation, however, is not strong enough to show a causation: some people who is short play really well (such as Tyron Bogues), and there are a lot of very high guys that have zero skill at all.Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc is even weaker than that. It means that one event is preceded by another, but does not show any kind of relation at all. Just both happened in sucession, and superstition, or bad logic, made me think they were related, when they weren't. For example: I bought lottery right after I ate peanut butter for breakfast, and I won. Therefore, I conclude that peanut butter "gives me luck", and I start to eat peanut butter every time I buy lottery. Those aren't related. At all.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />This kind of "two events in a row" are a classic mistake of superstition. People do not realize that every single event must be preceded by another, just becouse events do not happen in a vacuum. For example: if I win the lottery, it's obvious that I have eaten something before. Be it peanut butter, or anything else. Whatever that food is, I would call it "my lucky food".It's like when people say world will end in 2012 becouse Mayans only made calendars up to 2012. That's a flawed logic argument as no other. Once Mayans started to make calendars, they had two options:1) make an infinite number of calendars, which is physically impossible.2) make a finite number of calendars.As 1) is impossible, they have to do 2). So if they make a finite serie of calendars, that serie has, by definition, an end. That end was 2012. But had they chose another year, there will be an end, anyways. So paranoic superstition people would use that other year, instead. Be it 2012, 2015, 2099, 54933, whatever, they'll use the same logic "Mayans only did calendars up to year X, so year X is the end of the world". The only way they wouldn't say that, is if Mayans would do an infinite amount of calendars. Which is impossible.</blockquote>

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