Correlation and causation. It’s some pretty important shit, that most people don’t understand. Correlation is the degree which two events are connected. Causation is the relationship between the two, where one of the events only exists because of the other event. That is, one event causes the other one. Just because two events are correlated, doesn’t mean that there is causation. Still, for some fucking reason society keeps confusing correlation with causation.
Case in point. A study was done a long time ago that noticed that there was a very close correlation between sales of ice cream and violent crime. It seemed that whenever a city was in the middle of a crime spree, people bought more ice cream. Was it something to relax them from their fears that they might be a victim? Was there something in the ice cream that made people want to hurt each other? Nope. As it turns out, the connection between the two is the temperature outside. When it’s hotter outside, people but more ice cream. They also get hot and cranky and beat the shit out of each other. Go fucking figure. Correlation, without causation.
The same shit is happening today with phenomenon of Online Gamers. It is ending up that more and more of these nut bags who are shooting up places and killing their kids, are all players of World of Warcraft. So, obviously what are they assuming? Of course, they’re assuming that playing WoW causes you to kill people.
Once again, we have a causation error. World of Warcraft doesn’t make you kill people. Being a loser that is out of touch with reality makes you want to kill people. As it just so happens, losers that are out of touch with the world happen to be the same type of people that like WoW. The causation, is from them being dorks. Just look at this kid above. He’s the loser who killed “Baby Grace.” WoW didn’t do this to him. His parents did.
Please people, stop being dorks.