The Texas Sharpshooter has been known to inflict that type of pain:
You will get a chortle or two from Spurious Correlations, a web page devoted to graphically persuasive relationships among pairs of sets of entirely unrelated data. For example, you can see the graph of “US spending on science, space and technology” superimposed on that of “Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation.” The staggering 99.79% overlap is a classic in correlation without causation.
Likewise, “Per capita cheese consumption” and “People who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets” has a correlation of 94.71%. And the correlation between “People who drowned after falling out of a fishing boat” and the “Marriage rate in Kentucky” is 95.24%.
Common sense tells us to treat these coincidences as jokes. But in his fascinating new book The AI Delusion, economics professor Gary Smith reminds us that computers don’t have common sense. He also notes that, as data gets larger and larger, nonsensical coincidences become more probable, not less. Robert J. Marks, “Study Shows Eating Raisins Causes Plantar Warts” at Mind Matters
Robert J. Marks is one of the authors of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.
See also: Robert J. Marks: Human Consciousness May Not Be Computable One model of consciousness would mean that conscious computers are a physical impossibility
and
AI that can read minds? Deconstructing AI hype