As to why and how a story, not data, should dictate choices, the answer is that it is the story which encodes the causal relationships among the variables. Once we explicate these relationships and represent them formally, we can test which partition gives the correct treatment preference. For example, if we represent causal relationships in a graph called "causal diagram" (see Bayesian networks), we can test whether nodes that represent the proposed partition intercept spurious paths in the diagram.