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Humans struggle with causality. Even those whose professions are dedicated to understanding causality struggle with it. That's the reason we have heuristics lik

Humans struggle with causality. Even those whose professions are dedicated to understanding causality struggle with it. That's the reason we have heuristics like the "5 whys" that only occasionally work. Consider the following philosophical problem: An inattentive headphone-laden jaywalker wearing black crossed a road at night and was killed by a drunk driver speeding in a large SUV. What was the root cause? The amusing thing about this question is that if you actually have an answer, it reveals more about your biases than it does about the situation and potential solution(s). Various people will chime in about the latest thing that annoys them...whether it is inattentive pedestrians, jaywalkers, pedestrians wearing black at night, drunk drivers, speeders, or people driving cars that are too big and dangerous. But all of them are wrong because there is no discernible root cause. The problem is that we don't have multiple realities in which we can control each factor involved. And even if we did, it is entirely possible that if you can isolate and control each factor individually, that the accident still wouldn't have happened. Sometimes it takes a confluence of factors for an event to actually occur. And people's obsession with finding a single cause for complex phenomena hinders their ability to actually find fixable solutions.

skybrian 6y ago
The article is about much simpler forms of causality though, like what happens when you hit a ball with a bat. Learning enough about causality to handle everyday physics would be an important advance.
tremon 6y ago
What was the root cause? That's easy: the root cause is the roadworks two streets over, which caused the driver to divert from his usual route.
User23 6y ago
> The amusing thing about this question is that if you actually have an answer, it reveals more about your biases than it does about the situation and potential solution(s). Various people will chime in about the latest thing that annoys them...whether it is inattentive pedestrians, jaywalkers, pedestrians wearing black at night, drunk drivers, speeders, or people driving cars that are too big and dangerous. But all of them are wrong because there is no discernible root cause. Causality is usually complex and often complicated. Let's consider another case: An attentive person without any sensory impairment crossed at a crosswalk in broad daylight and was killed by a sober bicyclist going ten miles an hour[1]. What was the root cause? All of the same objections apply. If you want an ultimate root cause you need to turn to theology, in which case as a Christian I can say that all death is ultimately caused by sin. While I personally find that to be a philosophically sound position, it isn't especially useful for answering the pragmatic question of how to reduce preventable evils like (some?) pedestrian deaths. My personal bias in this case is to take a pragmatic approach. That means identifying factors that can be changed with a high rate of compliance at a cost that is less than that of the evil being prevented. Mature safety systems take this into account. As an example, take basic firearms safety[2]: 1) Treat all guns as if they are loaded. 2) Never point a gun at anything you don't want to destroy. 3) Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot. 4) Be sure of your target and what's behind it. In order to negligently discharge a firearm and cause harm, all four of these rules must be disregarded. In this case, even though any number of events from mechanical failure to muscle spasm could have caused the discharge, if someone causes unintentional harm I can say the local root cause was failing to observe the safety rules and hold said person morally responsible[3]. Many other examples of safety systems should come to mind, including relevant to the pedestrian safety scenarios. [1] One way that this could plausibly happen is that the pedestrian is knocked over and hits his head. Falling and hitting one's head is a surprisingly common way to die. [2] There are variants, but they all aim to achieve safety in much the same way. [3] This holds regardless of one's position on civilian ownership of firearms, because police and military personnel are also human and need to follow a safety system.
- viklove 6y ago
  > If you want an ultimate root cause you need to turn to theology No, you do not "need" to turn to theology. There are plenty of explanations that do not involve invoking myths. > all death is ultimately caused by sin So the pedestrian was secretly a pedophile? That's a pretty strange explanation... I'd say in this case the blame likely rests on city planners, for creating situations in which travelers can collide.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    The parent is clearly invoking the "uncaused cause" model of God. Physicalism doesn't have an originating cause except maybe the big bang depending on what you think could have happened before it. So your options in terms of the originating cause are either to turn to religion for a philosophical answer, or to say "I don't know and we may never know".
    - viklove 6y ago
      The parent is clearly not invoking "uncaused cause," since the parent literally says: > all death is ultimately caused by sin So unless you're saying the big bang was a sin, your comment does not follow the parent's logic.
      - beaconstudios 6y ago
        That's not quite what the uncaused cause means. The uncaused cause is the answer to the question "if every effect has a cause, then where did the cause-effect chain begin?" - or in simpler terms, "what was the first thing that happened?" Christians would say God, scientists would say the big bang (or something even before that, it's basically unknowable). They're not even mutually exclusive as you could say that the big bang is the means by which God created the universe, or any other origination story you can come up with. The uncaused cause says nothing about later cause-effect pairs, only the originating cause.
        6y ago
NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
The problem isn't the lack of multiple realities for counterfactual testing - it's that the idea that there's a basic root cause for any particular outcome is ill-founded. The basic idea of 'look beyond immediate causes' is reasonable, but the cult of the root cause analysis is a bit out of control.
- jerf 6y ago
  Perhaps you'd be happier with an idea like "when looking at a bad outcome, invest some effort looking at the proximal causes of the bad outcome to see if there's a place you can invest less net effort to fix the problem and for greater gain." Obviously all root cause analysis terminates at "Because the Big Bang and subsequent quantum fluctations had this result" or something similarly utterly unactionable, but if you use the metric above, it is a common observation that such analysis can reveal higher bang-for-the-buck engineering outcomes than simply fixing the immediately obvious, and that there is some typical patterns that emerge such as the root cause analysis eventually getting back into things that are infeasibly expensive or impossible to fix (e.g. "because human culture" will show up in a lot of them at some point but you aren't going to fix that just because two holes were misaligned on the factory line), meaning such analysis also meaningfully terminates. I tend to operate on this myself because you don't actually get "a" root cause analysis. I can always find a tree of causes as I go back, not "a" series of causes. But it's a fairly frequent occurrence that if you look over such a tree, there's at least one node with a highly favorable cost/benefit tradeoff that you can find with surprisingly minimal effort.
- godelski 6y ago
  The problem is that there are atomic causes, not a root cause. The problem is we're acting like a singular force causes an event instead of several factors and a long chain. We need to dispell this myth that "x leads to y". It is only true in the most simple of cases and in restricted domains.
bserge 6y ago
Funnily enough, this is what our "collective consciousness" is useful for. Humans act a lot like an ant colony, except individuals have much more autonomy. So, you ask, say, 1000 people what the root cause is. The result will be decided either by majority or the most plausible argumentation. Say 700 people agree the jaywalker was at fault. That will become "reality" for the group, which will then likely spread throughout the hive. The main lesson will be "don't jaywalk at night", the secondary one likely "don't wear black clothing at night" and probably a third one "beware of drunk drivers". Sorry if that sounds weird, I'm also trying to wrap my head around what human intelligence is and how it can be applied to AI (Approximate Intelligence :)).
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  Examples like this are how I realized that almost everything is subjective. Things we think are objective are usually subjective things that we decided to agree on.
  - bserge 6y ago
    Yeah, I'd say that's true of most things that are too complicated to be understood by a single individual. In the end, it's all about the collective. It needs a consensus to move forward, and that doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough. The whole human civilization works mostly on subjective conclusions, sometimes a minority brings up enough facts/proof to change the established consensus, but often we just pile layers upon layers on top of things that are not objectively true or not completely true. But they're good enough, and we're very adaptable.
  - kempbellt 6y ago
    Ironically, I would argue that just about everything that happens is an objective event, but any and every interpretation/understanding of causality is itself, subjective. In the hypothetical scenario the objective reality is: A pedestrian and a car collided. Other factors come into play, which all have potential influence on the causality of this objective reality, and said factors are frequently subjectively asserted as more relevant to causality than others. Strong assertions to causality may include: Driver was drunk, pedestrian was jaywalking, pedestrian was wearing dark clothing, driver was speeding, driver was texting, driver and pedestrian had a prior altercation, driver was tired, etc Weaker assertions to causality may include: It was a Tuesday, someone sneezed 3 miles away, a butterfly flapped its wings, pedestrian knocked over salt during dinner earlier, etc Causality is hard... We're getting better at it, but superstitions are a thing that exist, even if they are a bit odd.
jjtheblunt 6y ago
what an excellently worded observation; hadn't thought clearly of this before, though noticed the idea vaguely
joe_the_user 6y ago
Causality overall is hard. Humans fail at dealing fully with casual perfectly fairly often. But human tend to do far better than computers (partly failing rather than totally failing, etc). But your examples involve human's linguistic expression of casualty, which is an entirely different question. The amusing thing about this question is that if you actually have an answer, it reveals more about your biases than it does about the situation and potential solution(s). Various people will chime in about the latest thing that annoys them...whether it is inattentive pedestrians, jaywalkers, pedestrians wearing black at night, drunk drivers, speeders, or people driving cars that are too big and dangerous. A lot of human language is "socially significant noise", which some might object usually isn't true. But it often serves an entirely different purpose than an accurate modeling of reality. People walk through complex society, putting their socks on before their shoes and otherwise doing the basic things but articulating positions that ... other people would consider "nuts" but this situation has nothing to do with a failure of casual modeling, which happens on a different logical level entirely.
shoo 6y ago
We can make progress in solving this specific inference problem with a carefully constructed experimental design & human challenge trials. E.g. repeat variations of the scenario where we keep all factors the same but intervene and force one or more factors to something else, e.g. force the pedestrian to listen to a boombox, not headphones. Or force the driver to drive a trolleybus not an SUV. Consider a full factorial design across the following dimensions: inattentive | attentive ; headphone | none | boombox ; jaywalk | non jaywalk ; wearing black | wearing dark blue | wearing high viz reflective gear ; night | day | dawn | dusk ; driver sober | drunk | half as drunk | twice as drunk | on meth ; driver speeding | driving at speed limit | driving at half limit ; driving large SUV | hatchback | pushbike | trolleybus | road train . A mere 2 * 3 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 3 * 5 = 10,800 different scenarios. Since the outcome in each scenario is stochastic we might need to do 10-fold replication per scenario. So a total of 108,000 trials. Approval from research ethics review committee pending.

skybrian 6y ago

The article is about much simpler forms of causality though, like what happens when you hit a ball with a bat. Learning enough about causality to handle everyday physics would be an important advance.

tremon 6y ago

What was the root cause? That's easy: the root cause is the roadworks two streets over, which caused the driver to divert from his usual route.

User23 6y ago

> The amusing thing about this question is that if you actually have an answer, it reveals more about your biases than it does about the situation and potential solution(s). Various people will chime in about the latest thing that annoys them...whether it is inattentive pedestrians, jaywalkers, pedestrians wearing black at night, drunk drivers, speeders, or people driving cars that are too big and dangerous. But all of them are wrong because there is no discernible root cause. Causality is usually complex and often complicated. Let's consider another case: An attentive person without any sensory impairment crossed at a crosswalk in broad daylight and was killed by a sober bicyclist going ten miles an hour[1]. What was the root cause? All of the same objections apply. If you want an ultimate root cause you need to turn to theology, in which case as a Christian I can say that all death is ultimately caused by sin. While I personally find that to be a philosophically sound position, it isn't especially useful for answering the pragmatic question of how to reduce preventable evils like (some?) pedestrian deaths. My personal bias in this case is to take a pragmatic approach. That means identifying factors that can be changed with a high rate of compliance at a cost that is less than that of the evil being prevented. Mature safety systems take this into account. As an example, take basic firearms safety[2]: 1) Treat all guns as if they are loaded. 2) Never point a gun at anything you don't want to destroy. 3) Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot. 4) Be sure of your target and what's behind it. In order to negligently discharge a firearm and cause harm, all four of these rules must be disregarded. In this case, even though any number of events from mechanical failure to muscle spasm could have caused the discharge, if someone causes unintentional harm I can say the local root cause was failing to observe the safety rules and hold said person morally responsible[3]. Many other examples of safety systems should come to mind, including relevant to the pedestrian safety scenarios. [1] One way that this could plausibly happen is that the pedestrian is knocked over and hits his head. Falling and hitting one's head is a surprisingly common way to die. [2] There are variants, but they all aim to achieve safety in much the same way. [3] This holds regardless of one's position on civilian ownership of firearms, because police and military personnel are also human and need to follow a safety system.

viklove 6y ago
> If you want an ultimate root cause you need to turn to theology No, you do not "need" to turn to theology. There are plenty of explanations that do not involve invoking myths. > all death is ultimately caused by sin So the pedestrian was secretly a pedophile? That's a pretty strange explanation... I'd say in this case the blame likely rests on city planners, for creating situations in which travelers can collide.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  The parent is clearly invoking the "uncaused cause" model of God. Physicalism doesn't have an originating cause except maybe the big bang depending on what you think could have happened before it. So your options in terms of the originating cause are either to turn to religion for a philosophical answer, or to say "I don't know and we may never know".
  - viklove 6y ago
    The parent is clearly not invoking "uncaused cause," since the parent literally says: > all death is ultimately caused by sin So unless you're saying the big bang was a sin, your comment does not follow the parent's logic.
    - beaconstudios 6y ago
      That's not quite what the uncaused cause means. The uncaused cause is the answer to the question "if every effect has a cause, then where did the cause-effect chain begin?" - or in simpler terms, "what was the first thing that happened?" Christians would say God, scientists would say the big bang (or something even before that, it's basically unknowable). They're not even mutually exclusive as you could say that the big bang is the means by which God created the universe, or any other origination story you can come up with. The uncaused cause says nothing about later cause-effect pairs, only the originating cause.
      - 6y ago

NovemberWhiskey 6y ago

The problem isn't the lack of multiple realities for counterfactual testing - it's that the idea that there's a basic root cause for any particular outcome is ill-founded. The basic idea of 'look beyond immediate causes' is reasonable, but the cult of the root cause analysis is a bit out of control.

jerf 6y ago
Perhaps you'd be happier with an idea like "when looking at a bad outcome, invest some effort looking at the proximal causes of the bad outcome to see if there's a place you can invest less net effort to fix the problem and for greater gain." Obviously all root cause analysis terminates at "Because the Big Bang and subsequent quantum fluctations had this result" or something similarly utterly unactionable, but if you use the metric above, it is a common observation that such analysis can reveal higher bang-for-the-buck engineering outcomes than simply fixing the immediately obvious, and that there is some typical patterns that emerge such as the root cause analysis eventually getting back into things that are infeasibly expensive or impossible to fix (e.g. "because human culture" will show up in a lot of them at some point but you aren't going to fix that just because two holes were misaligned on the factory line), meaning such analysis also meaningfully terminates. I tend to operate on this myself because you don't actually get "a" root cause analysis. I can always find a tree of causes as I go back, not "a" series of causes. But it's a fairly frequent occurrence that if you look over such a tree, there's at least one node with a highly favorable cost/benefit tradeoff that you can find with surprisingly minimal effort.
godelski 6y ago
The problem is that there are atomic causes, not a root cause. The problem is we're acting like a singular force causes an event instead of several factors and a long chain. We need to dispell this myth that "x leads to y". It is only true in the most simple of cases and in restricted domains.

bserge 6y ago

Funnily enough, this is what our "collective consciousness" is useful for. Humans act a lot like an ant colony, except individuals have much more autonomy. So, you ask, say, 1000 people what the root cause is. The result will be decided either by majority or the most plausible argumentation. Say 700 people agree the jaywalker was at fault. That will become "reality" for the group, which will then likely spread throughout the hive. The main lesson will be "don't jaywalk at night", the secondary one likely "don't wear black clothing at night" and probably a third one "beware of drunk drivers". Sorry if that sounds weird, I'm also trying to wrap my head around what human intelligence is and how it can be applied to AI (Approximate Intelligence :)).

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
Examples like this are how I realized that almost everything is subjective. Things we think are objective are usually subjective things that we decided to agree on.
- bserge 6y ago
  Yeah, I'd say that's true of most things that are too complicated to be understood by a single individual. In the end, it's all about the collective. It needs a consensus to move forward, and that doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough. The whole human civilization works mostly on subjective conclusions, sometimes a minority brings up enough facts/proof to change the established consensus, but often we just pile layers upon layers on top of things that are not objectively true or not completely true. But they're good enough, and we're very adaptable.
- kempbellt 6y ago
  Ironically, I would argue that just about everything that happens is an objective event, but any and every interpretation/understanding of causality is itself, subjective. In the hypothetical scenario the objective reality is: A pedestrian and a car collided. Other factors come into play, which all have potential influence on the causality of this objective reality, and said factors are frequently subjectively asserted as more relevant to causality than others. Strong assertions to causality may include: Driver was drunk, pedestrian was jaywalking, pedestrian was wearing dark clothing, driver was speeding, driver was texting, driver and pedestrian had a prior altercation, driver was tired, etc Weaker assertions to causality may include: It was a Tuesday, someone sneezed 3 miles away, a butterfly flapped its wings, pedestrian knocked over salt during dinner earlier, etc Causality is hard... We're getting better at it, but superstitions are a thing that exist, even if they are a bit odd.

jjtheblunt 6y ago

what an excellently worded observation; hadn't thought clearly of this before, though noticed the idea vaguely

joe_the_user 6y ago

Causality overall is hard. Humans fail at dealing fully with casual perfectly fairly often. But human tend to do far better than computers (partly failing rather than totally failing, etc). But your examples involve human's linguistic expression of casualty, which is an entirely different question. The amusing thing about this question is that if you actually have an answer, it reveals more about your biases than it does about the situation and potential solution(s). Various people will chime in about the latest thing that annoys them...whether it is inattentive pedestrians, jaywalkers, pedestrians wearing black at night, drunk drivers, speeders, or people driving cars that are too big and dangerous. A lot of human language is "socially significant noise", which some might object usually isn't true. But it often serves an entirely different purpose than an accurate modeling of reality. People walk through complex society, putting their socks on before their shoes and otherwise doing the basic things but articulating positions that ... other people would consider "nuts" but this situation has nothing to do with a failure of casual modeling, which happens on a different logical level entirely.

shoo 6y ago

We can make progress in solving this specific inference problem with a carefully constructed experimental design & human challenge trials. E.g. repeat variations of the scenario where we keep all factors the same but intervene and force one or more factors to something else, e.g. force the pedestrian to listen to a boombox, not headphones. Or force the driver to drive a trolleybus not an SUV. Consider a full factorial design across the following dimensions: inattentive | attentive ; headphone | none | boombox ; jaywalk | non jaywalk ; wearing black | wearing dark blue | wearing high viz reflective gear ; night | day | dawn | dusk ; driver sober | drunk | half as drunk | twice as drunk | on meth ; driver speeding | driving at speed limit | driving at half limit ; driving large SUV | hatchback | pushbike | trolleybus | road train . A mere 2 * 3 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 3 * 5 = 10,800 different scenarios. Since the outcome in each scenario is stochastic we might need to do 10-fold replication per scenario. So a total of 108,000 trials. Approval from research ethics review committee pending.