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The original was posted on /r/autism by /u/absurdwifi on 2025-10-19 15:32:11+00:00.
Original Title: Does it seem to you that neurotypical people have problems understanding transitory correlations(when two things only correlate to each other through a third factor, and lose the correlation if that third factor is removed)?
I was reading a post in r/science that says
and I noticed that everyone was taking it as a given that marijuana use among people who were at risk was a cause of psychosis, because studies have noted the correlation.
But I also noticed that no one had seemed to have considered the possibility that people whose circumstances put them most at risk of psychosis might also have a great tendency to try marijuana, and that the marijuana use and the psychosis of those people might only correlate with each other because they both correlate to the great difficulty that might be experienced by someone who is in danger of becoming psychotic.
And the fact that people without that other factor don’t tend to have psychosis even given marijuana use seems to point to the correlation being transitory.
And that led me to considering a lot of situations where I had discussions with neurotypical people who made assumptions of cause and effect because of correlation, but where they couldn’t understand that the correlations they saw were actually related to correlations that occurred not directly between the two things, but instead between each of the two things and a third (or even more than one) intermediary factor.