Divorce and margarine went in and (deservedly) out of fashion together, as everyone knows who thinks about it for a moment and is old enough to remember. And now, as marriage continues its long decline, Kentucky fishing-boat drownings do too, probably since marriage makes you want to go out alone in a small boat with nothing but a case of beer and your fishing gear. Seriously, how many of those guys out there fishing do you think are single? Single guys are probably somewhere where they're more likely to meet single women.
And yet Tyler VIgen refers to these and many others as "Spurious Correlations." These are among a top-ten list that also includes murders with hot objects, death from getting tangled in the bedsheets, Nicholas Cage movies, cheese-eating, moon-landing, suicide, Miss America,video games, killer spiders, spelling bees, and Ph.D.s.
Spurious Correlations
10 more here:
The 10 Most Bizarre Correlations
And here's ten that riff on another commonly reported form of statistic or study, not a correlation of change over time, but studies where a subset of respondents who have a particular response also show a different mixture of responses to a completely different question than is representative of the entire study pool. Stuff like, 60% of divorced people preferred chocolate ice cream compared to 80% of the general population.
10 Crazy Correlations Between Unrelated Things
By Gus Lubin and Tony Manfred
But wait, there's more correlations, marked in some damn good and genuinely important articles:
How a TV Sitcom Triggered the Downfall of Western Civilization
And cutting a wider swath but coming to about the same conclusion, although blaming not sitcoms but the reality shows that mostly replaced them ...
Postapocalyptic hellscape by Jacob T. Levy
(h/t Jason Rylander and Todd Seavey)
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