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Bloggers are fond of yelling “correlation is not causation” at any piece of research that comes to a conclusion they find distasteful, but what they almost never do is actually read the paper in question, which invariably addresses most of their concerns: research methodology; alternate explanations; potential intervening variables; results of similar studies in the past; shortcomings in the data set; etc. That’s not to say that researchers always take every possible problem seriously enough, or that social science papers don’t deserve heightened scrutiny. But it is to say that if, in 30 seconds, some possible problem with the research program occurs to you, it’s almost a dead certainty that the person with a PhD who performed the study also thought of the same thing. And discusses it in the paper.
— Kevin Drum
