But (as you've found) I doubt they'd tell you what you want to know, anyway. The problems aren't special epidemiological phenomena but generic problems of causal inference. They just bite harder in epidemiology because (1) background theory isn't as good at pinpointing relevant causal factors
I've found that there's always a lot of field-specific tricks; it's one of those things I really was hoping to find.
This isn't usually that satisfactory, since it's a lot of work and the result often depends on arsepulls.
Yeah, that's not worth bothering with.
(2) controlled experiments are harder to do in epidemiology.
The really frustrating thing about the lithium-in-drinking-water correlation is that it would be very easy to do a controlled experiment. Dump some lithium into some randomly chosen county's water treatment plants to bring it up to the high end of 'safe' natural variation, come back a year later and ask the government for suicide & crime rates, see if they fell; repeat n times; and you're done.
They also can't do things like magically turn a population-level correlation into an individual-level correlation, so I'd guess you're SOL there.
I'm interested for generic utilitarian reasons, so I'd be fine with a population-level correlation.
They just bite harder in epidemiology because (1) background theory isn't as good at pinpointing relevant causal factors
I've found that there's always a lot of field-specific tricks; it's one of those things I really was hoping to find.
Hmm. Based on the epidemiology papers I've skimmed through over the years, there don't seem to be any killer tricks. The usual procedure for non-experimental papers seems to be to pick a few variables out of thin air that sound like they might be confounders, measure them, and then toss them into a regression alongside...
How much confidence do you place in the scientific theory that ordinary matter is made of discrete units, or 'atoms', as opposed to being infinitely divisible?
More than 50%? 90%? 99%? 99.9%? 99.99%? 99.999%? More? If so, how much more? (If describing your answer in percentages is cumbersome, then feel free to use the logarithmic scale of decibans, where 10 decibans corresponds to 90% confidence, 20 to 99%, 30 to 99.9%, etc.)
This question freely acknowledges that there are aspects of physics which the atomic theory does not directly cover, such as conditions of extremely high energy. This question is primarily concerned with that portion of physics in which the atomic theory makes testable predictions.
This question also freely acknowledges that its current phrasing and presentation may not be the best possible to elicit answers from the LessWrong community, and will be happy to accept suggestions for improvement.
Edit: By 'atomic theory', this question refers to the century-plus-old theory. A reasonably accurate rewording is: "Do you believe 'H2O' is a meaningful description of water?".