[frognumber]

I don't think the audience for the comment was "published authors in the field" but "random people in a web forum" who make comments like yours ("Imagine telling someone you made a website and they're like 'cool, but did you even make sure it has the little green padlock?'")

In that context, it's often helpful to remind people that:

- Correlation is not causation

- It takes many replicated results to go from hypothesis to theory

(Which is quite different from "science is hard"). This is doubly-true with the current level of hype and grandstanding in science where primary and secondary sources are often clickbaity and misleading.