Splash Biography

Does going to college make you smarter? Does cold weather give you a cold? Did your Super Bowl ad generate sales? Do certain Taylor Swift songs make you sad? In this course, you will not learn the answers to these questions. Instead, you will learn about causal inference: the art of evaluating if your proposed answer is correct. This course will explore what causality is. We will discuss the difference between correlation and causation. We will touch on some common pitfalls you might fall into when drawing causal conclusions from real world data. We will also touch on some techniques for avoiding the pitfalls of in a laboratory setting and in the real world. Above all, we hope that you will get better at articulating skepticism when answering all kinds of questions, or even just when reading the news.