Comment by asdff

This is appealing to authority, assuming the work ought to be perfect just because people are professionals. What if there is no good way to control for these latent factors? What if the latent factors change by the year and their magnitude of effect on the overall result changes? All this happens. No matter what you model with statistics, you are only ever presenting your model and its assumptions based on the data that were used with it. You can never say "now I understand reality" if you actually believe in statistics as they are and not just the popular religion of 'statistics'.