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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 i

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.

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.