This is, among other things, a quirk of both statistics (models with relative effect measures are better behaved/easier than ones with absolute measures outside

This is, among other things, a quirk of both statistics (models with relative effect measures are better behaved/easier than ones with absolute measures outside toy examples) and early causal inference where we underestimated just how bad smoking is for you. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20010205/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20010205/