[rewma]

> I don't know whether this is a truly serious paper or can be filed under "Spurious Correlations"[0]

I don't understand what leads you to believe that a paper that can be filed under "spurious correlation" could be automatically discarded as not being serious.

One of the purposes of scientific articles is to report interesting findings to peers, which serve as food for thought. By definition, the state of the art of any field is perpetually in a "work in progress" stage, and researchers feed off each other's work to progress.

This paper reports an observation. Like all similar papers, now the community is free to look into it and bring some clarity to the topic. This is how progress is achieved.

[amanaplanacanal]

I think the issue comes when results are reported and consumers try to use those results to determine which behaviors are risky. We all try to stay on top of "the latest science" but are results like this really actionable by consumers?

[rewma]

> I think the issue comes when results are reported and consumers try to use those results to determine which behaviors are risky.

Well, consumers are doing it completely wrong if they're looking up to papers as established and definite references regarding scientific findings.

Papers do not define reality, at most they only describe the author's perception of reality give their circumstances and current understanding, and reflecting the current state of the art. Thus observations might be off, but still interesting enough to spark further work to build up knowledge and clarify misconceptions.

It's like the parable about the blind men and an elephant[¹]. We might have an academic paper describing a novel species of trees that have a strong correlation with snakes, and consumers would be using that paper to justify shooting at treetops just to be sure they aren't attacked by a snake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant