"The example of the tarot cards is a bit dicey. I'm not sure I'd want to employ the decision procedure you're implying - something about correlation not implying causation."

True. If there is actually no causative relationship, then we wouldn't expect the correlation to hold for an extended period.

Of course, if the correlation continues to hold, then we should speculate that there is a causative relationship, even if it's not predicted by any part of our reality-model, which suggests there are important principles not included in it.

We didn't need to know about UV and ionizing radiation to recognize that exposure to sunlight could cause burns. We deduced certain properties of UV (such as its existence) from our observations of how burns were associated with light.

Any recognition of correlation that doesn't specify a causative mechanism looks somewhat dodgy. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't utilize that correlation.