Spurious Correlations: A Big Problem With Big Data?

I'm impressed with Tyler Vigen for his work popularizing Spurious Correlations. He has found an effective way to convey an important message. Namely that correlation does not equal causation. Lots of things are correlated but that doesn't mean that they have anything to do with each other. To create his graphs Vigen indulges in "Data Dredging… a technique used to find something that correlates with one variable by comparing it to hundreds of other variables" (Vigen, 2015, page xii).