That paragraph doesn’t sound smart to me. It seems like it’s argues against a strawman. Scientists who studies issues like this usually don’t publish raw correlations but try to control for various factors they can think of.
Of course you can still criticise that scientists failed to control for relevant factors but that means you actually have to read the papers.
You can also make general arguments against the usefulness of regression analysis but Scott doesn’t make those in that article.
That paragraph doesn’t sound smart to me. It seems like it’s argues against a strawman. Scientists who studies issues like this usually don’t publish raw correlations but try to control for various factors they can think of.
Of course you can still criticise that scientists failed to control for relevant factors but that means you actually have to read the papers.
You can also make general arguments against the usefulness of regression analysis but Scott doesn’t make those in that article.