
Hill for the data scientist: an xkcd story - dsr12
http://livefreeordichotomize.com/2016/12/15/hill-for-the-data-scientist-an-xkcd-story/
======
Symmetry
There's another way of looking for causality directly from data. If A and B
are uncorrelated but both correlate with C then you know that C isn't causally
upstream of either.

~~~
ue_
How can two things not correlate with each other, but both correlate with a
third thing? This seems like saying x=5, y=3, and that there's some variable z
which x and y are both equal to?

~~~
lowkeyokay
The number of people who like the taste of vanilla (I suppose) doesn't
correlate with hours of sunlight in some area. Both correlate with amount of
ice cream sold.

------
joshwa
Anyone else frustrated hovering over the strips looking for the title-text?

------
digi_owl
As an aside, i feel there has been a lack of such strips from XKCD lately.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Strips in article:

* [https://xkcd.com/552/](https://xkcd.com/552/)

* [https://xkcd.com/1592/](https://xkcd.com/1592/)

* [https://xkcd.com/242/](https://xkcd.com/242/)

* [https://xkcd.com/1217/](https://xkcd.com/1217/)

* [https://xkcd.com/925/](https://xkcd.com/925/)

* [https://xkcd.com/323/](https://xkcd.com/323/)

* [https://xkcd.com/605/](https://xkcd.com/605/)

* [https://xkcd.com/1170/](https://xkcd.com/1170/)

* [https://xkcd.com/1462/](https://xkcd.com/1462/)

* [https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/)

Latest strip at time of writing is
[https://xkcd.com/1772/](https://xkcd.com/1772/)

Current strip is [https://xkcd.com/1868/](https://xkcd.com/1868/)

Eyeballing it I think its still likely uniform even if there hasn't been one
that would have made it into the article in the last 100.

