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X causes Y if surgical (or randomized controlled) manipulations in X are correlated with changes in Y

X causes Y if it doesn't obviously not cause Y.

This seems to conveniently overlook the decades of quantitative social science built on "I controlled for a couple things, and p is less than .05, so X causes Y."

But I'm not clear on the community context here. Is this just good-natured ribbing?

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I do not think it does overlook that research: those papers generally assume that once those things are controlled for, the remaining variation is as good as random and thus we indeed recover the causal effect of X on Y. Many papers are probably _wrong_ on this, but they still use "causation" in the first sense and not in the second sense.

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