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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (325525)	3/8/2025 4:05:56 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 359349

Correlation is a concept in the arena of logic. It was a concept long before anyone practices statistics. That correlation is not causation is tried and true. Actually, the premise that correlation is not the same as causation arose in the late 19th century, as statistical methods began developing. The first mention seems to be William Farr around 1850. It is likely that William Stanley Jevons and others in the 1870s and 80s contributed to research, and history of statistical methods actually formalized the concept with the development of statistics which we still know of today around the 1890s, by people like Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Correlation in a stand-alone sense really was a fairly late-bloomer. Which makes sense, as it "evolved out of epidemiology during cholera outbreaks in the 1840s and 1850s. William Farr linked death rates to water sources but didn't assume causation outright -- John Snow's pump-handle experiment later proved that two things moving together wasn't proof of why." There was significant consternation in the 1890s over the point, so it was about that time the issue was resolved as statistics actually became a field of study.