Observational data is so profoundly affected by the decisions and assumptions of those who chose to select them and analyze them in a specific way that I cannot

Observational data is so profoundly affected by the decisions and assumptions of those who chose to select them and analyze them in a specific way that I cannot agree with this premise that the implications should be “trusted”. Those implications are a function of the choices made by the people making those decisions. The data have no opportunity to tell an independent story. There are tools that can make this better (eg, finding an instrumental variable), but this wasn’t done here.