"Avoid generic tangents."
You could in fact replace "cannabis" and "schizoprehnia" with "foo" and "bar" and you'd have a template for a shallow dismissal of published studies.
> You could in fact replace "cannabis" and "schizoprehnia" with "foo" and "bar" and you'd have a template for a shallow dismissal of published studies.
Indeed, replacing with foo and bar would be valid, and the fact that this is the case, i.e. that correlation is not evidence of causation in general, remains a deep and important statement about reality. It is particularly important to correct this when the headline is direct misinformation about what the study found. Do you think code snippets using foo/bar as placeholders are shallow or uninformative? There is a good reason they are often used in programming discussions: to demonstrate that whatever is being shown applies in general.
Science is done based on the evidence that is found, and this counts as some evidence. Does it answer every question? Of course not. Does it help improve our understanding of the occurrence of it? Yes.
Correlation is not causation, but where there's smoke, there's often a fire—as these findings continue to be validated (and there have been other studies that find similar links), it becomes more and more relevant to understand why there is such a correlation—to find a causal mechanism, if it exists, or to confirm that it's just spurious correlation.
Actually, as the replication crises shows, most smoke from papers either isn't real / doesn't point to a fire. So that maybe is a flawed line of reasoning. Correlation (if the research is done carefully to avoid intentional or unintentional p-hacking, and free of fraud) can point to maybe do a follow-up study (or do lots of different kinds of studies to do a good meta analysis that can try to establish causation) but the replication crisis indicates the good studies are swamped by the meaningless ones.
I read the article looking for evidence of causation and didn't see it, so it could be either way. Maybe the actual study was more clear on this point.