Correlation and Causation

Let me preface this anecdote with a brief description of the difference between correlation and causation. I'm sure most of you know that just because two events are correlated that it does not mean that one caused the other. For example, even if event A happens around the same time as B, A might not cause B. A third event, C, could have caused both A and B. If this is too abstract, just ponder this little fact: the US has never lost a war in which donkeys were used. Now should we trade in all of our M1 Abrams for Eeyore in a flak jacket? Remember this, or nothing that follows will seem wondrous and amazing--or make any sense. Anyway, on to the story...

Although it may seem surprising, I was very serious as a child. Very serious, very matter-of-fact; a precocious and therefore obnoxious know-it-all. Moreso than I am now, even. I also had a tendency to not get the joke; or at least I would get the joke but them proceed to tell the questionable comedian where he or she was mistaken. I was a barrel of laughs back then. Case in point, the phrase "it's always in the last place you look." I took this advice solemnly to heart as a great piece of wisdom about how hard it is to find things that you've lost. I never made the logical leap that, by definition, any missing item is in the last place you look because once you find it, you stop looking. I had assumed just correlation, when causation had reared its ugly head. Embarrassingly, since this phrase entered my head as an idiomatic expression long before I could question my analysis, I did not make this connection until very late in life--high school, in fact. One of my fellow thespians made some comment about how much that phrase annoyed her. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why that particular colloquialism would be annoying, when it hit me like a ton of bricks. The world became a little bit bigger for me that day, and the stars just a little bit brighter.

I have had many such "blonde" moments over the past quarter century. Most of them are just as harmless and humerous as this one (or even funnier, if you didn't care for it), but one in particular stands out as having a powerful impact on what is important to me and one of my self-described defining characteristics.

I was once an altarboy at Mountain View Lutheran Church, for those who know it. Save your jokes; I was Lutheran and our clergy were allowed to marry, sparing us from the iniquities of some other unnamed denominations. One Sunday morning, as I was in the narthex in my robe, lighter/snuffer in hand, waiting for my opportunity to shine, an elderly man who was volunteering as an usher struck up a conversation with me. The conversation meandered like good banter does, and shortly before I was to go on, he said to me, "the day you don't learn anything is the day you die." Which brings us back to correlation and causation. There are two events in this statement: learning something (A) and being alive (B, or more specifically, not B, but that's not the question). A is clearly correlated to B. You can not be alive and not learn something, even if it is something mundane and trivial like "it was cloudy today." However, in my earnestness, I took this as more of a commandment: learn or you WILL die. I don't know if this short and inauspicious episode had a direct effect on how important it is to me to always be learning and trying something new, or if it just struck a mental chord with me (good ol' correlation and causation, yet again), but considering this is coming from somebody who can only stand the monotony of exercise by doing math problems in his head, it does at least seem a pretty accurate description.

(Let's see, a 150 lbs. person burns 100 calories per mile so that works out to...hmm...Let's see what that is in calories per step...that means I'm burning calories with X efficiency...cool, one mile down. Oh, and faster than usual...I wonder what my improvement per week is...)

Oops, I mean, the moral of the story is: learn something, or I'll kill you. NOW.