Spurious Correlations
"Military intelligence analyst and Harvard Law student Tyler Vigen illustrates the golden rule that "correlation does not equal causation" through hilarious graphs inspired by his viral website. Is there a correlation between Nick Cage films and swimming pool accidents? What about beef consumption and people getting struck by lightning? Absolutely not. But that hasn't stopped millions of people from going to tylervigen.com and asking, "Wait, what?" Vigen has designed software that scours enormous data sets to find unlikely statistical correlations. He began pulling the funniest ones for his website and has since gained millions of views, hundreds of thousands of likes, and tons of media coverage. Subversive and clever, Spurious Correlations is geek humor at its finest, nailing our obsession with data and conspiracy theory"
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2015–2023years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Looks like grandparent could use a copy of Vigen's _Spurious Correlations_:
https://www.amazon.com/Spurious-Correlations-Tyler-Vigen/dp/...
I think it'd make a lovely coffee table book.
- If you like this sort of thing, you may also enjoy:
1) My website Correlated.org (http://www.correlated.org), which has been generating weird correlations based on users' survey responses for more than four years.
2) Spurious Correlations (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) by Tyler Vigen, which also offers wacky correlations, but based on publicly available datasets rather than survey responses.
3) Google Correlate (http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw), which allows you to draw a curve, then find search terms whose popularity over time matches the shape you drew.
- I'm a bit surprised that no mention was made of Tyler Vigen's other 'pet' project: Spurious Correlations, which includes the hilarious spurious correlation that the number of people who've drowned in swimming pools is positively correlated with the number of films Nicholas Cage has appeared in. :-)
