This was published in Nature, I'm pretty sure the reviewers understand and account for that. HN and reasonably educated people always think this is some huge gotcha, second only to "CORRELATION != CAUSATION!!!!"
Nature isn't an arbiter of truth, it's a publisher of papers. It's also meant to be read critically by people who see a paper like this and and think "interesting, but this is just an observational study, I'd like to see more research, maybe something with more controls before I believe this".
Say what you want about the "correlation doesn't imply causation", but many people do not understand why that is. As a shorthand for "hey, you don't know the statistics behind this, so don't take the pretty picture at face value", it's pretty good.
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This was published in Nature, I'm pretty sure the reviewers understand and account for that. HN and reasonably educated people always think this is some huge gotcha, second only to "CORRELATION != CAUSATION!!!!"
Nature isn't an arbiter of truth, it's a publisher of papers. It's also meant to be read critically by people who see a paper like this and and think "interesting, but this is just an observational study, I'd like to see more research, maybe something with more controls before I believe this".
Say what you want about the "correlation doesn't imply causation", but many people do not understand why that is. As a shorthand for "hey, you don't know the statistics behind this, so don't take the pretty picture at face value", it's pretty good.