[squigz]

The "correlation is not causation" argument gets brought up every single time such a study is shared on HN, so I'm not sure what you mean by "picked a funny time"?

Anyway there's no reason to discount it, but it does mean you can't run with the assumption that there is causation.

[sigbottle]

I don't think psychology is useless, not one bit. But specifically the way modern papers publish findings make me distrust basically all statistical studies in the social sciences, aside from even the most basic philosophical issues that arise from these kinds of studies (people are very different, etc.).

Like even if you accept a bunch of premises to make the studies even work, the raw stats are often so bad and there's no rigor to try and actually explain alternatives that I just have stopped reading them entirely.

Again, I'm not one to hate on the social sciences. History, anthropology, politics, law, psychology, sociology, all of that is very interesting and important. But the horrible statistics that don't understand garbage in garbage out have turned me off of it. Much rather read qualitative studies that actually try to gather detailed, real data, even if it's not as automated as a random survey