The human brain strikes again. It is built into our cognitive machinery to look for patterns and naively ascribe causation. We're not rational beings that sometimes mess up. We're a clusterf--k of cognitive biases all the way down.*

Cool pattern! Sure, maybe there is something there.** And/or maybe our brain is doing "conspiracy theorizing lite". Its all on the same spectrum -- the same flawed cognitive machinery trying to operate in a weird modern world quite different from where we came from.

A better way: write out your favorite hypothesis. But don't stop there... keep going... write out many hypotheses. Then find ways to test them. To tap into our best selves, I recommend The Scout Mindset (book). Here is an infographic summary of part of it: https://imgur.com/qN31PX8

Probably not a better way: float one's first gut feels to the Internet phrased as i.e. the better question and feed empty calories to our pattern-craving brains. There is reason some of our brain functions are considered higher order.

* Maybe I'm overstating this. Let me know? I want to read Rationality and the Reflective Mind by Keith Stanovich (https://academic.oup.com/book/5930) as a counterpoint to the usual suspects (such as Tversky & Kahneman)

** But what is there. What kind of pattern? What kind(s) of causation could be at work? See Judea Pearl's "ladder of causation". Nice write-up here: https://samuel-book.github.io/causal_inference_notebook/pear...