You are making a logic error. When there is no causal connection between two items it is very well possible that there is a connection that allows you to say something about populations. But you will never be able to say something about an individual. And that is where all these arguments flounder, we put population information in, in order to engineer features that then allow us to make decisions about individuals. For those cases where feature engineering can dig up causal connections this works wonders, for those cases where it does not or gives you apparent connections that are not really there you end up with problems.