Correlation vs. Causation. (Or just because you have feathers doesn’t mean you can fly).
A lovely anecdote from Prof Clay Christensen’s ‘How will you measure your life’:
Imagine you are in the 19th century. It is very possible to look at all flying things around you (i.e. just birds) and come to the conclusion that flying = having feathers / wings + flapping hard. And that’s what folks did. For centuries, man’s endeavour to fly involved strapping variations of feathered wings to himself and jumping off tall buildings. Correlation said that should work, didn’t it?
Only when Bernouilli’s concept of ‘lift’ was applied to flight and we understood aerodynamics, did human imagination take flight (literally). The underlying root cause was aerodynamic lift, and that’s what made the Wright brothers’ attempt different from all the failed experiments before them. Causation needs deep thinking and understanding of the ‘why’, and not just pattern matching.
Think about all the problems you have at hand, and consider carefully – are you making any important important decisions based on pattern matching / anecdotes / opinions vs understanding the real root cause? Nothing could be more dangerous.
Understand lift and build the airplane.