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The Illusion of Causality in Charts
How charts can mislead us by depicting causes that may not exist.
The departments that use the new methods tend to perform better, but the real reason is that they all manage products that have experienced a surge in market demand during the same period. In any case, when examining a scatter plot that illustrates a correlation between an intervention and an outcome, we should always ask ourselves if the relationship could be the result of a spurious association rather than a direct causal link. The most classic example of this type of effect is the famous John Snow’s cholera map, which shows how the number of deaths clustered around a polluted water pump.
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