This article gets a lot of things backwards. 1. The point of counterfactuals is not to "prove" causality; it's to help you detect possible causal routes, in th

This article gets a lot of things backwards. 1. The point of counterfactuals is not to "prove" causality; it's to help you detect possible causal routes, in the presence of given events under examination. E.g. if you know events X, Y and Z co-occurred, and you want to know if X or Y could have possibly caused Z to happen, the counterfactual formulation can answer that question. If not X implies not Z, whereas Y does not alter Z, then you have eliminated Y as a causal agent, and have identified X as a possible causal agent (in fact the only possible causal agent, if Z could not be influenced by another external, unidentified agent, or by itself). Furthermore, in the presence of a number of counterfactual statements, you can allocate responsibility and blame, linked to expectations of events. So aliens is a silly example, unless for whatever reason the author has a very high prior expectation for their existence, which exceeds that of file purging errors.