Whoa, what happened there? Someone made a comment here that made a lot of good points (others had made them, but this poster did it much better), and I voted it up, as did someone else, but now it's gone, and there's no "comment deleted" indication.
Is LW not always giving the most up-to-date site?
My use of the word "cause" was not technically accurate. I needed to find a way to word my comment that didn't use it that way.
It is a commonplace that correlation does not imply causality, however eyebrow-wagglingly suggestive it may be of causal hypotheses. It is less commonly noted that causality does not imply correlation either. It is quite possible for two variables to have zero correlation, and yet for one of them to be completely determined by the other.