Thinking Clearly about Association Studies (Risk Factors and Causal Salad included)

f2harrell:

Showing the relative explained variation of a set of potential confounders in predicting treatment choice. It’s amazing how many papers using propensity scores fail to decode the scores.

I think some of the causal people take issue with this being called descriptive research, because confounders are a causal concept. For example here. Your emphasis on explained variation vs presenting a table with conditional coefficients and (implicitly) interpreting them as causal is important, but maybe it’s also a bit of slippery slope?