Douglas_Knight comments on Be Skeptical of Correlational Studies - Less Wrong

8 Post author: jkaufman 20 November 2013 10:19PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 22 November 2013 01:36:18AM 2 points [-]

And I gave both positive and negative effects of alcohol. So what?

By "valuable" I mean an easily manipulable causal mechanism that explains a relatively large amount of the population variance of health. I don't mean that it has actually been manipulated, let alone manipulated correctly. And I certainly don't mean that this is all we know about medicine. We understand vitamin D and inebriation because of experiments.