This is the opposite conclusion of the first citation I provided.

Sorry, can you be more specific? Where does anybody claim that smoking is not strongly correlated with life expectancy?

And the second "in house" LW link asserts that in terms of decision making about smoking in light of whether or not it's linked to cancer is about a 50/50 proposition.

The second "in house" link is a very simple thought experiment to explain the concept of confounding. It is meant as an example where evidential decision theory fails. In this situation, causal decision theory gives the right answer, it is certainly not a 50-50 proposition. Moreover, the correct answer within the thought experiment is that smoking does not cause cancer. This is because they postulated the existence of a deterministic confounder. This has no implications for whether or not such a confounder exists in the real world.

I 'm asking why the correlations are thought of as causes by reports on the relationship.

Because the confounders, ie the "smoking lesions", would have to be unrealistically strong to fully explain the observed correlation between smoking and lung cancer. This is the part where I showed you the sensitivity analysis.

Furthermore, ccording to Hume, causal inferences are THEMSELVES observed by constant conjunction, implying we have know sure way of knowing what the relationship between causes and correlations is.

Of course we don't have a "sure" way of knowing about causal relationships. But if you adopt "certainty" as your epistemic standard, you wouldn't even be able to tell whether parachutes save lives in people who are falling from airplanes.

The Japanese smoke more (if not the most) than most cultures yet are also one of the most healthy cultures.

This is called an "ecologic" argument, and it is considered very weak. Note that your sample size is essentially 2, as the units you are making inferences about are countries, not individuals.

A further problem is that "negative outcomes" are normatively tied to cultural standards.

Now you're just trolling... We're talking about life expectancy, lung cancer, heart attacks etc here.