As everyone knows in the abstract but sometimes forgets in the heat of the moment, correlation does not imply causation. John Cochrane reminds us that in addition, causation does not imply variation. Just because something is causative doesn’t mean it’s particularly important. In my field of genetics, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) can point to many, many genes that are causative for a given disease, but most of them don’t matter much.
Another challenge when looking for meaningful causes is that there may be none.
Nehaveigur 