At the end of Vanessa Didelez’s talk in the Foundations of causal inference workshop at the Isaac Newton Institute today, I asked her whether she would be okay with a mediation publication that only discusses potential interventionist interpretation in the Discussion section of the paper. The immediate reaction from Vanessa was that she does not like this but will not police it. In the discussion afterward, Thomas Richardson showed more disagreement with me. When I raised the potential that requiring scientists to specify separable components of the treatment will make us not popular, Thomas responded that “when I got my academic training we were not asked to be popular” (or something like this). Provoked by this comment, I decided to write a post to articulate my point.