I do worry sometimes that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, and that people are starting using correlation-causation as an I'm-smarter-than-you sort of status signal - that is, once people pass a certain intelligence level I worry less about them claiming Facebook causes the Greek debt crisis because they're correlated, and more about them hearing a very well-conducted study showing an r = .98 correlation between some disease and some risk factor, and instead of agreeing we should investigate further they just say "HA! GOTCHA! CORRELATION'S NOT THE SAME THING AS CAUSATION!"
I mean, I admit it's an important lesson, as long as people remember it's just a caution against being too certain of a causal relationship, and not a guarantee that a correlation provides absolutely no evidence.
once people pass a certain intelligence level
This seems crucial to me; you're really talking about a few percent of the population, right?
Also, I'll note that when (even very smart) people are motivated to believe in the existence of a phenomenon they're apt to attribute causal structure in.correlated data.
For example: It's common wisdom among math teachers that precalculus is important preparation for calculus. Surely taking precalculus has some positive impact on calculus performance but I would guess that this impact is swamped by preexisting variance in mathematical ability/preparation.
Babies named Ava caused the housing bubble, and other intriguing data.
More illustrative than the usual "correlation is not causation" mantra.