[vagabondvector]

the problem is that on noisy data, that adjustment of the variables isn't really as statistically clean as maths would say.

it's the same with red meat causes cancer studies. they say they remove smoking and lack of exercise and still wave the statistical significance.

it's very questionable how they removed the influence of these variables, since meat eaters do smoke way more, and do not exercise, and care about their health less.

[jimrandomh]

Actually, I think noise is a red herring, and that worrying about noise (instead of worrying about unmeasured confounders and incorrect causal structures) is how epidemiology got into this mess in the first place.