[kbutler]

The key is testing the behavior and theory.

There are often lots of confounding factors - in the SIDS case, much of the decrease in SIDS rate can be attributed to changes in factors (continuing the decrease from before the "back to sleep" campaign, generally safer sleep areas, changes in cause-of-death coding, etc.) https://naturaltothecore.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/revisiting...

When you don't have the correct theory or mechanism, it's easy to do the wrong thing - like when the British navy thought acidity prevented scurvy and shifted from using lemon juice to more-acidic lime juice processed with copper tubing that destroyed the vitamin C... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy

Rather than just following a statistical anomaly, you need to devise and perform tests that will invalidate your theory, as was done with the other theories (e.g., the priest bell in the article). This is perilous when people's lives or global economies are at stake, and so anomaly hunting and cargo cult science can persist in high-stakes, difficult to test environments.

[jerf]

I would observe that A: nothing I said precludes any of that; certainly "science's" job is not done with the mere observation of facts and B: nothing about any of that is helped by including spurious theories in the observation of a brute, unexplainable fact.

Also, I'd happily set the bar higher on correlations to be reported in this manner... then again, I consider 0.05 to be a mistake anyhow that should simply be rectified as that has been concretely demonstrated to not be enough, IMHO.