People who smoke a lot of cigarettes often get sick. Did the cigarettes cause that?
The rooster crows and the sun rises... did the rooster cause that? These questions have obvious answers, but not all inquiries into causality do.
Science has gotten better at weeding out correlation and causality, as demonstrated in The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie.
Pearl is the scientist and Mackenzie the science writer; Dana Mackenzie is our guest.