At the risk of Overt Pointyheadedness, if I were going to do a meta-analysis of the DB community posts, I'd suggest that among the cut-points in the DB'er Typology is one that is at work on this thread recently.
On the one hand you have those like @Thinker and SP Himself who have, at the end of the day, an inherently positivist epistemology -- we look for causality.
I mean, what's the basic mantra in the DB community -- figure out what you did 'wrong' to contribute to this outcome: "I think I wasn't supportive, but of course that's just my perspective, so it doesn't really matter."
So there's an inherent bias towards positivism -- otherwise there'd be no point in doing that. True, true, correlation is not causation, but the more "tests" we have of these ad-hoc hypotheses, the more comfortable we are with the findings.
On the other hand (and here I'm not trying to essentialize you or construct you) there are those who tend to have a more holist or even postmodern epistemology, where reflexivity carries the day.
But from the positivist POV, there is a remarkably strong degree of symmetry in many of the situations here; the fact that people can refer to "script" and write things like "that sounds familiar" suggests there is a set of patterns, and patterns lend themselves to evaluation and testing. Maybe the material Thinker sent is horoscope-like in its generality; on the other hand, there's at least some probability that the phenomena it discusses explain some amount of the variance.
Neither Thinker nor I will ever know the true causation, of course, but that doesn't mean it's not worth examining.
