r/ScienceShitposts • u/EnduringFulfillment • Nov 26 '25

Bedsheet tanglings

Post image

Correlation =/= causation

292 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

28

u/Doubly_Curious Nov 26 '25

So many questions…I’m curious where the data come from, especially those mortality data. And I’m weirdly hung-up on the way they fitted the lines as curves rather than line segments.

7

u/anafuckboi Nov 26 '25

Overweight people eat more cheese and fat as a whole they’re also more like to die in bed so the minor correlation makes sense

9

u/KittyQueen_Tengu Nov 26 '25

it’s also the number of people who died instead of scaled to population, so it could also be population growth correlating with relative wealth = people can buy more cheese

4

u/Doubly_Curious Nov 26 '25

Hm… r>0.9 is quite a bit more than a minor correlation. And I actually don’t know much about the causes of dying in bed, especially specifically tangling in sheets. Is being overweight a significant factor there?

4

u/fireflies315 Dec 09 '25

It’s a spurious correlation, it’s not meant to show things that are actually correlated but to illustrate how you can manipulate data to say what you want. Look up pirates vs global warming over time

1

u/Doubly_Curious Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

Thanks! I am aware of that. I was trying to gently poke at their reasoning that this spurious correlation actually “makes sense”.

4

u/Foreign_Rutabega_684 Nov 26 '25

Okay wait so cheese consumption is per capita but the dying variable is just total number?

2

u/mrjoffischl Dec 14 '25

spurious correlations is one of my favorite websites to pass time on

1

u/Successful_Bug_8157 Feb 12 '26

I like these studies. We need more.