I usually pay a great deal of attention to what philosophers have to say about slippery concepts such as causation, induction, and the logic of scientific inference. Philosophers have the advantage of standing apart from the hurly-burly of scientific debate and the practical realities of dealing with data. They have been less contaminated than other scientists by the anticausal biases of statistics.
This here is a fantastic point to make; it really points to the importance of stepping back from the work and thinking about it from an extremely high level abstraction as to whether, in general, the beliefs governing the approach actually makes sense.
