Well, of course the conclusion is that you don’t know, Mr. Author. Because the very thing that triggered your interest in the subject of X and Y was that there was no clear cut consensus on the subject. If there were, you wouldn’t have needed to do research at any level of depth at all, because those findings would be well known, and you’d have found them easily through a simple web search.<p>Instead you were drawn to a topic which seemed ambiguous, which had multiple possible interpretations, multiple plausible angles, and on which nobody could agree. You didn’t explicitly know these things starting out, but they were embedded in the very circumstances which caused you to investigate the subject further.<p>Yes, determining causation is sometimes hard, is it also sometimes very easy. However, very easy answers are not interesting ones, and so we find ourselves here.