I was pleased to read this Nature article – Five ways to fix statistics – recently as it mirrors my concern at the way statistical analysis is sometimes used to justify or confirm a bias and not reveal a real causal relationship. Frankly these days I just get turned off by media reports of studies showing statistically significant relationships as evidence for or against the latest health or other fads.
As the Nature article says, statistical significance tests often amount “to uncertainty laundering:”
“Any study, no matter how poorly designed and conducted, can lead to statistical significance and thus a declaration of truth or falsity. NHST [null hypothesis significance testing] was supposed to protect researchers from over-interpreting noisy data. Now it has the opposite effect.”
No matter how good a relationship appears, or how significant the statistical analysis shows it to be, it is simply a relationship and may have no mechanistic or causal…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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