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Re:Coffee won’t give you extra energy, just borrow a bit tha... by rileymat2 on Monday February 13, 2023 @07:14PM (#34783051)
This is true, but when you see correlation it is a great signal to look for causation.

But my question to you, in the event of a positive correlation and not having good causation data in either direction, a reasonable person may start to act on the correlation for qualitative reasons.

For example if an initial study of the past finds cigarette smoking correlated with lung cancer, a reasonable person might qualitatively know that smoke goes into the lungs so a lung cancer cause is reasonable and use that as enough reason to stop smoking. It would be unreasonable,IMO, to say “correlation != causation” and keep smoking.

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