What is spurious correlation?

Spurious correlation is a concept in personal epistemology: Two things happening together does not mean one causes the other.

Example: You notice that every time you have a productive writing session, you happened to drink green tea that morning. After six occurrences you conclude that green tea causes your creative flow. You restructure your morning around the ritual. But when you actually map the data, a different structure emerges: the productive sessions all fell on days when you had no meetings before noon. The tea was incidental — you brewed it on meeting-free mornings because you had time. The real variable was uninterrupted cognitive space, not caffeine. The tea correlated with productivity because both correlated with a third factor: schedule structure. You were not wrong that the pattern existed. You were wrong about what caused it.

This concept is part of Phase 6 (Pattern Recognition) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for pattern recognition.