> They're building models of the world, and testing and challenging a few of their beliefs at a time, to gradually come closer to the truth. Absolutely. Scienc

> They're building models of the world, and testing and challenging a few of their beliefs at a time, to gradually come closer to the truth. Absolutely. Science is about using mathematics and logic to abductively reason about and tease out underlying facts. In fact I see provaility in science and causation as orthogonal issues: Consider a stable supplied voltage and a variable voltage divider (potentiometer). Suppose measuring the voltage once has intrinsic RMS voltage noise associated with it. So while we can never prove experimentally the exact value of the voltage at the voltage divider with zero error, we can drive the error arbitrarily low by oversampling, which means repeating the experiment over and over. In the general case we never actually reach the true value, but that doesn't mean "voltage can not be measured". Trying to measure this voltage inappropriately (say outside the reference range of an ADC, or with an ADC with too low a resolution such that the noise is systematically rounded in the same direction doesn't mean it's impossible to measure voltage, just that the measurement attempt is flawed. Similar with causation. Of course caution is always advised with naive correlation. The problem is not propagation of such caution, but the pretense that no techniques exist to gather evidence of causation, and the omission of such techniques when sharing such a rant.