Did you know that the consumption rate of Margarina per capita is connected with that of divorces? Don’t you believe it? Look at the graphic designer, the line is superimposable: from 2000 to 2009 how the consumption of margarine in the United States descends so the divorce rate in Maine falls. Is there a correlation? No.
In statistics they are called “correlations of spuries”, but the programmer Tyler Vigen He has created a site to demonstrate how the meaningless relationship between two events can generate an illusion of the effect.
A project launched in 2014, but for a year Tylervigen.com It uses the AI to generate its graphic designers (so they see some beautiful ones), which on the one hand are a walk, on the other they are also educational, seen how many people are led to believe in non -scientific correlations (for example on vaccines, on the economy, on food, and so on) simply looking at a graph.
It is difficult to resist not to browse the hundreds of random and meaningless relationships on the Vigen website. For example the Distance between Saturn and the sun It varies in the same way that people are looking for google “how to make a child”. Just as Pirate attacks in the world follow the same trend as those who download Firefox on Google. Or: the number of movies in which it appears Michael Caine From 1976 to 2012 coincides with those who voted for a democratic president in Maryland. While the number of films in which Nicolas Cage appeared from 1980 to 2020 is related to those who voted for a candidate for liberal president in Georgia.
You can spend whole days, and among other things Vigen always indicates the
Sources from which data were taken and related (without a connection, but producing impeccable graphs). Brilliant, funny, and every time you see a meditated graphic designer, people meditated. Or rather: always check the source.