They may be trolling, but it’s a pretty good example of statistical naïveté. What I mean by that is ignoring conditional independence even when it is obvious from common sense. Common sense tells us that living in an old house does not ‘cause’ car accidents, but it also tells us that a poor working elderly person may have a higher risk of both car accidents, and living in an old house. The dependence between the effects disappears when conditioned upon observations closer to the chain of causality.