When you have a correlation plus a plausible mechanism for causation, it's not appropriate to invoke "correlation is not causation". It's literally true, but distracting. That's where you do additional studies.
People say this so much that is now used as a way to dismiss any study. It’s almost becoming a meme.
I think is clear that the baseline of any study is that correlation does not imply causation. You start there. That’s a basic intelligent start. You never take for granted that one thing causes the other. The ideas is to try to identify if there are any potential paths for causation.
Otherwise there’s not even a point in sharing or discussing these studies.
I’m not saying that bringing this up is wrong, but does it need to be said so much? I think it’s more interesting to analyze beyond that and try to see if there’s causation. We already know there’s an abysmal amount of correlated things but there must be a percentage of those things which are in fact caused by another at a certain level. I would love these discussions to be more focused on this and not just doing the plain classic dismissal of “correlation doesn’t mean causation”.
Its actively harmful to pretend it is because it diverts from real research and actual solutions and
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