At a cube-themed birthday party, a conversation about a MrBeast video sent me down a rabbit hole: how do hoop height, ball size, and ball weight vary across every level of organized basketball? The answer is more interesting—and more uniform—than I expected.

Perhaps the single most-quoted phrase about statistics is that 'correlation does not imply causation.' It's a phrase I've spoken hundreds of times. The thing is, our catchphrase is wrong.