Perhaps :) Point taken. Re-reading, it looks like I skipped a transition sentence from the comment to what I wrote. (Or maybe the parent comment got edited? Not sure.)
> You can get cancer from not getting enough sleep. There are plenty of innocuous substances that look fine chemically but disrupt sleep. It doesn't have to be directly mutagenic to cause cancer.
I agree with the comment as written, though it strikes me that virtually no mainstream publications use writing that clarifies or quantifies these kinds of indirect relationships.
I see a lot of intellectual laziness or dumbing down. Two categorical errors happen often:
(A) writing “everything is connected”. This can be true in some sense while also being useless. The more interesting framing is to ask “to what degree” and under what modeling assumptions.
(B) Writing about various linkages without clarifying probability and impact dilution.
The connecting idea in my head was something like this: when most publications talk about cancer they tend to lack even a basic statistical language.
Backstory: Having hundreds of interactions with ChatGPT, which is trained on much mainstream writing, made this interaction pattern obvious and tiresome.
Another way of saying my complaint: It feels like otherwise intelligent people hit a barrier where they start speaking vaguely. They pretend like this is the best we can do. It ideally isn’t; we have extensive scientific and statistical studies. There is no reason why we as a culture have to accept such statistical phobia as quality writing.