The Myth of Causality and The Harvard Fallacy

Causality (also referred to as causation) is the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event, where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first. In common usage, causality is also the relationship between a set of factors (causes) and a phenomenon. Anything that affects an effect is a factor of that effect. A direct factor is a factor that affects an effect directly, that is, without any intervening factors.

That above is the definition of causality. Beware though about how it gets used in the business world. I like to call it The Harvard Fallacy. Or the tendency to think that you’re smart because you graduated from Harvard. Rather you were admitted to Harvard because you were already smart. Cause and effects are often tough to find. Also when we gather data, things don’t look better. In fact, data tells us whether two things are correlated. But does not say what comes first. Thus, the next step of saying what causes what is pure speculation!

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