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Why do you think these researchers were so incompetent that they didn't control for even blindingly-obvious factors like age? Are you familiar with their other
by gilrain 10y ago
Why do you think these researchers were so incompetent that they didn't control for even blindingly-obvious factors like age? Are you familiar with their other work in the field, or something?
"Correlation does not equal causation" is parroted more often by pseudo-intellectuals than scientists, now. It seems that many interpret it as "correlation is not causation and is therefore garbage which can tell us nothing".
- placeybordeaux 10y agoCorrelation can tell us where to search, but the article concludes with the author being smug about sprinkling chili onto his omelette. There are still plenty of confounding factors, hardest of which to control for post-hoc would be self selection bias. This study just takes the data from a prior study and analyzed to see if one of the specific variables would predict another. There's no way to tell if they just did this for all of the variables, if they did this without having a prior hypothesis then the results should only be used for constructing another study, not as interpretable results that we can take action on.