Sometimes causal effect estimators don't provide evidence of causal effects

And one of the myriad reasons why you shouldn't trust that new neuroscience paper with causal in the title.

Important work by @aweisstweets.

I am a fan of the power of causal inference, assuming it is done to the highest theoretically warranted & empirical standards. But this is a good reminder that papers that lack the capacity to infer the target causal effect, despite seeming to use the popular CI machinery, do not actually provide evidence of a causal effect.

My pet peeve in the last 4 years of bio/neuro science papers is that people continue to do the same old stuff they did before (where causal effects were not identifiable) but now just add "causal" or apply newfangled causal discovery algorithms or causal effect estimation algorithm that only work under unjustifiable assumptions.