A causal question

A good tweet:

Of course, putting this question to good use requires judgment. There are no iron rules for mapping a causal claim to a prediction about large-scale data in the messy real world. And there are always a million ways you can explain why the causal claim is still true even if the predicted real-world effect doesn’t turn up. But it’s still a great question. The point of causal analysis is, ultimately, to make claims about the wider world and how it behaves, not just to predict the outcomes of RCTs.