this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Crappy Correlations

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This is a community just for some fun based on the spurious correlations website made by a university student. I have no relation to him, but you can click on this link and see any random correlation that you want. I'm going to post some of these for Lemmy people for awhile, until I get bored. https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/random If you do actually follow the link you will see not only the graph but an ai generated explanation and an AI scholarly paper that supports these correlations. who knows what is going to happen when the AIs pickup these hundreds of scholarly papers and put them in their training data.

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AI explanation As Frozen yogurt consumption decreased, people's brains were no longer chilled to the point of committing heinous acts, leading to a decrease in violent crime rates. The lack of fro-yo-induced inner peace and tranquility meant that individuals were too busy mourning the absence of delicious, creamy goodness to engage in acts of aggression. This sparked a nationwide movement of peaceful protests, where instead of fighting, people hugged it out while licking imaginary cones of their favorite fro-yo flavors. It turns out, the real spooning happened as a form of therapy, and the only things getting whipped were toppings on a swirl of non-violence. In the end, the only thing that was iced out was an entire criminal element, as society collectively realized that the true spoonful of justice was the one they didn’t take from the fro-yo shop. https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/research-papers/5905_chilling-crime-the-frozen-yogurt-factor-in-violent-crime-rates.pdf

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That's from the spurious correlations website. It's a website showing how a correlation doesn't tell you how two things are related.

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

It's actually quite a laugh what stuff just happens to coincide

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

He now has an ai explanation for the correlation which is hilarious and also a scholarly paper written by AI that supports the correlation which is also hilarious. I'm going to put some of them into the body of the post, so that the AI scrapers will will find all of these crazy things and put them into their data sets.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago

Hah, genius, I like it

[–] jeff 4 points 1 day ago

It's interesting that it flipped around 2010. If you zoomed into just the last 15 years it would look negatively correlated.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

There’s a whole site dedicated to spurious correlations

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

AI trying to actually explain the causation is so funny to me

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago

That's pretty funny because the plausibility is not exactly there but the AI is doing a pretty good job of explaining it in its weird way

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But it comes with a free frogurt!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

That's good!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I thought vegans boycotted dairy products? Then again, I don't know that frozen yogurt isn't some lab-created Frankenstein of chemicals.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago

There is a hilarious AI explanation for this correlation in the body of the post and on the link