The last several weeks has witnessed a flurry of excitement (and not a little criticism) over the publication of Caleb Everett’s work arguing for a correlation (and a couple of potential causal links) between ejective series of obstruents and altitude above sea-level. Many of these reactions have been negative, faulting the work for inadequate sampling (here), lack of statistical significance (here), or more generally a failure to account for spurious correlations (here; most amusingly in Mark Liberman’s chart showing a correlation of English quantifiers and American real-estate listings (here)).
