A thing that really annoys me on HN (though it's certainly not specific to this website but more general to any place where the users self style as 'intellectua

A thing that really annoys me on HN (though it's certainly not specific to this website but more general to any place where the users self style as 'intellectuals' or 'rationally minded' or whatever) is the amount of smart-sounding comments that betray a very cursory reading of what is being posted in the first place. For instance: -Yes, we know correlation isn't causation. Don't you think the authors aren't aware of that, you know, being scientists and all? That doesn't mean they aren't useful and shouldn't be taken into consideration for making policies. It doesn't mean people shouldn't investigate correlations in the search of a potential causal link. For the record, many therapeutic drugs are approved way before the exact mechanism causing the therapeutic effect is known. -Yes, they did control for all the obvious things such as socio-economic factors and so on. You'd know it if you actually read the paper, but searching for confounding factors is literally high school statistics. Don't you think the PhD-level authors wouldn't have thought about that? -No, no one ever said that there even was a causal link in the first place. It's explicitly acknowledged in the paper. What makes it interesting, though, is: 1) the large sample size and observation period, and 2) the prospective aspect of it, i.e. they simply waited for possible cancer outcomes instead of actively going for them and hunting for correlations. This makes the findings significantly more solid. Please, remember the guidelines: always take the most charitable interpretation of what someone says. Do assume that scientists are capable of doing their jobs, and whatever you've thought of in the few minutes of attention you gave this link, chances are the authors thought about it in the seven-odd years it took to publish it.