I use this framing quite a bit ("The best we can do is better than nothing"), but I don't really like it. A better framing is that it's not how much we can figu

I use this framing quite a bit ("The best we can do is better than nothing"), but I don't really like it. A better framing is that it's not how much we can figure out, it's what we can we figure out. Observational data is great for explaining things after the fact. It must be handled very carefully when used for predicting things before they happen. But if you can identify the most likely confounds and eliminate them, you may still be able to answer a lot of useful questions to a fair degree of certainty.