Comment by pcrh
1 day ago
This is why experimental science is different from observational studies.
Statistical analyses provide a reason to believe one hypothesis over another, but any scientist will extend that with an experimental approach.
Most of the examples given in this blog post refer to medical, sociological or behavioral studies, where properly controlled experiments are hard to perform, and as such are frequently under-powered to reveal true cause-effect associations.
This was my take as well. At least microeconomics has moved away from large-scale observational studies and has moved into experimental and quasi-experimental studies.
While the methods alone cannot fix it all ("You can’t fix by analysis what you bungled by design" [1] after all), it gets somewhat closer to unbiased results.
[1]: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.4159/97806740...