I would add that the original article is the perfect example of why a top-down argument is a not a valid argument. In general, you should never start from examples and work your way down to a bottom line - as this post shows, you can easily make correlations that are flat out wrong or can be explained in other ways that are more substantial.

If you want to learn how to properly draw conclusions from examples, learn statistics. Stats is all about making sure you have sufficient evidence (large sample sizes, small p-values) to back up a correlation.