I've seen one of these (on a different topic) posted to HN repeatedly in comments, by a variety of participants here. Really, people need to learn how to evaluate sources better here on Hacker News. That's part of being an educated person.
As someone heavily involved in medicine j see this all the time when the subject matter is something medical or biological- people really so feel that they can talk about issues of medicine and science with just the same authority as they can when otherwise discussing programming/whatever their day job is, when in fact they dont know just how much they don't know
Your post suggests that it has been researched before (and presumably proved to show no link), but searching Google did not yield any results for me. I, and I'm sure most everyone who has read this article, would love to look over the findings if you are able to share what you know.
As long as it is just random ranting without any data, it is more than welcoming that "regular" people try to understand expert opinion and in fact challenge it. If "facts" are so clear and indisputable, than those amateur research should easily be shown as wrong.
If not, amateur researcher make a highly valuable contribution. They highlight the fact, that social science, especially on social phenomenons, is (often) based on consensus. In this case here, the author makes an excellent contribution just by highlighting how easy correlation and causation can be (mis)interpreted.
For example the other day I read and article published in a well regarded management journal, by authors who claim having found out that the willingness of users clicking on ads is based on the hours of sunshine per day in that region. The correlation equals causation phenomenon is quite common among social scientists who try to show how scientific their contributions are.
making some off the cuff, armchair observations within a particular field of study (and blogging and serially promoting them to hacker news) without even making casual efforts to familiarize oneself with at least portions the vast amounts of knowledge publicly available on that field is, generously, pretty bad "science". And less generously, it's just hubris. This is not an "amateur researcher", this is someone who apparently based on posting history has a really high blogging-to-value ratio.
Of course, we all have the right to be clueless. I only requested that perhaps Hacker News doesn't want to encourage a culture of armchair cluelessness and particularly someone who appears to be a serial armchair blogger/HN promoter (see https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog).
There's no restriction on laymen studying, researching and trying to understand new frontiers of science, however just as the PhDs don't have a monopoly on science (and as you point out, they're far from perfect), neither do lay people have a monopoly on reinterpreting reality through the misinterpretation of facts.
tl;dr: You're entitled to examination of facts and to be examined for your own research. You're, however, not entitled to your own reality. Which is what happened in the article.
Yes this is correct. And to go off on a general tangent, correlation tells you where to start looking. After all, if A & B are correlated, then one of these statements must be true: "A causes B", "B causes A" or "there is something else, C, which causes A and B".
Just because you can find a correlation, doesn't mean that finding is irrelevant. It is very interesting and tells you where to start looking.
You missed "it's purely coincidence", which is an entirely valid option.
The next step after "I don't know" should be "let's investigate objectively".
To the next person with a pseudoscientific gut-feeling-bear-with-me-just-a-bit-while-I-pull-a-half-baked-idea-out-of-a-number-set-that-does-nothing-to-corroborate, please don't. Corrolation doesn't equate to causation, no matter what amount of reality bending assertions you apply. Warning those at high risk for cancer know they're at high risk and subsequently confirm the hypothesis doesn't mean the warning was the cause.