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Causal Explanations Considered Harmful
- lordnacho 4y agoWhat is the difference between causal projection and just not having enough data to determine the structure? Is it just that someone has picked sides and thus tests a slightly different graph? Also I've noticed that many substack articles are doubled up. I read the article, and then it repeats itself. What's up with that?
- TeMPOraL 4y agoI think most of the cases of "casual projection" happen organically - someone trying to explain B checks out various lines of reasoning until, at some point, they find a linear sequence[0] linking A and B that seems particularly strong in effect[1], and they focus on developing and promoting it. To do the reverse - to start with a full causal graph and trim it down to a DAG - requires you to explicitly, intentionally make your argument flawed. Doing this would be malicious. I don't think this happens often, because developing a full causal graph takes a lot of work, which you don't need if your goal is to just lie to people. -- [0] - Or a DAG, but you rarely see people capable of conceptualizing DAGs on the Internet. Even the software industry is still mostly stuck glorifying trees, and UX experts keep telling us most people aren't capable of working with trees either! [1] - Or interesting for other reasons. This is how you get motivated arguments which aren't technically wrong, just don't tell the whole story, but they happen to align with someone's interests.
- vintermann 4y agoIt's not causal explanations you need to avoid, it's junk! And while I'm glad that the article criticises one terrible theory promoted by Scott Alexander, I'm not impressed by their alternative LSD theory, or their many bold, unsubstantiated claims about what affected what (we do not, for instance, know that political assassinations affected civil rights law in both directions). Causal graphs are only circular if you are sloppy with time! We do not know if LSD in 1968 caused hippies in 1969, but we can rule out that hippies in 1969 caused LSD in 1968. And it may seem trivial, but it's not. That things don't happen before their causes is the main tool we have to break endless debates about what caused what, but both the article writer, Scott A. and the author he reviews seem to thrive a little too well in the world of muddy explanations.
- simple-thoughts 4y agoCausal relationships can go in reverse time. For instance, I know I will be hungry tomorrow so today I go to the grocery store. Tomorrow’s breakfast causes todays shopping. Perhaps better not to think too much on this though.
- yakubin 4y agoBy that logic if for whatever reason you skip breakfast tomorrow, a non-existent thing will have been a cause of your actions.
- simple-thoughts 4y agoThe future is possibilities that are not actualized yet. So, whether or not I actually eat breakfast or not is irrelevant as the future potentiality is the cause of my behavior today. Once tomorrow is today, it is no longer the future.
- yakubin 4y agoYour present prediction is the cause. You could even be predicting something that is logically impossible, i.e. there is no potentiality, still the prediction (in the present) would cause you to do something about it.
- mistermann 4y agoThoughts aren't non-existent though, they have a different type of existence. I think time may be similar, in that while we seem to have an innate conscious experience/perception of ~absolute time and absolute reality, the way the subconscious mind implements the portion of reality it is the source of may be substantially different.
- yakubin 4y agoThat thought predicting the future is in the present though, not in the future.
- osigurdson 4y agoAnother "considered harmful" post. Please stop.
- ARandomerDude 4y agoIdea: a "Considered Harmful Posts Considered Harmful" post.
- prometheus76 4y agoRecursive harm
- hardware2win 4y agoNot so original
- avn2109 4y agoFrom 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoAren't "Considered Harmful" statements themselves a causal explanation?
- BenoitP 4y agoI'll add that causal relationships should be multi-dimensional: the Vietnam vet and LSD-fueled hippy having their own truth can be modeled as subgroups that add arrows in their dimensions to the graph.
- cfiggers 4y agoI think this is a really thoughtful post. I'd encourage us (readers in general) not to trip over the specific illustrations that are being used to show a general point—namely, that when humans attempt to identify cause-effect relationships we're nearly always performing some kind of selection on top of the "raw" data available to us (which is, itself, nearly always a mere sub-set of all the "raw" data that could exist on that subject). This observation, if we take it seriously, will encourage us (humans in general trying to make sense of the world) to be humble about the conclusions we reach and mildly skeptical about the conclusions others reach, even when those conclusions feel really incontrovertible.
- cfiggers 4y agoCont'd: It's one thing to observe "Humans make mistakes all the time, therefore I should be humble about my conclusions and mildly skeptical toward others'." It's another thing to have a FUNCTIONAL MODEL of HOW AND WHY humans make certain categories of mistake. Such a thing can help us sort through proposed answers to complex questions with better discernment than just the basic realization that "this was arrived at by a fallible human, therefore it could be wrong, so I won't hold it too dogmatically."
- hammock 4y agoAll models are wrong, some are useful
- nonameiguess 4y agoI agree it's a thoughtful post and it makes a good point, but at the same time, it's an issue with the way a lot of people take Scott Alexander's posts. He is clearly not putting this out there as absolute truth, just saying here is an explanation, it sounds plausible, and I can't find much evidence immediately to disprove it. But he also says there are other equally plausible explanations he can't disprove. He often, if not always, puts an "epistemic status" disclaimer at the top of his posts, and the wider web community doesn't seem to know how to deal with those. They are used to interpret bloggers and the opinion sphere as 100% believing and promoting anything they write about. But that is very much not what Scott is doing. He understands quite well that causality is way too complicated to ever conclusively answer a question like "why did history turn out the way it did?"
- twobitshifter 4y agoI liked the article - I'm reading a management book that uses system diagrams to describe business processes and it separates resources from rates and qualities. The article muddies that with its diagrams but still gets the point across. An example from the book are the resources of recurring customers and staff. If you add marketing, you'll gain customers, and those customers will feedback and bring in more customers by word of mouth if your service is high quality (positive feedback), but you'll also lose customers with poor qualify service and that can be negative feedback. These feedbacks aren't always flowing in only one way. If marketing leads to a surge in customers, and you don't hire more staff quality will sink, and staff might leave due to being overworked . This feeds back into having less staff. The book grabs hold of the causality, you have to understand how your actions will affect the entire system and plan for it. In terms of determining causality, it’s true that major events aren’t ever simply driven by a single cause, but philosophy has studied this to deep depths and that’s where I think the article leaves the discussion too early. The arrow of time is not discussed and neither are necessary sufficient or contributory causes. LSD and Harvard Admissions may be contributory to the events of the 1960s, but not sufficient or necessary to explain assassinations.
- tom-thistime 4y agoOk, sure, when David Brooks, or the Freakonomics guys, or the Guns, Germs, Steel guy, claim they've nailed the causality of something, that's often facile gibberish. All this does nothing to undercut the validity of causality itself. I hope that's obvious, despite the clickbait title of the OP.
- hackandthink 4y agoAbout David Brooks explanations: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/06/16/the-david-brooks-files-how-many-uncorrected-mistakes-does-it-take-to-be-discredited/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/06/16/the-david-...
- NoImmatureAdHom 4y agoThis is why we do randomized experiments, just FYI. Obviously, there are many situations where we can't do them (e.g., randomizing people to smoking / not smoking). In those cases, the challenges the article discusses become relevant.
- thomastjeffery 4y agoHow much of our propensity to make causal statements depends on the language we use? In English, we structure sentences as either a question, answer, or command of causality. We have "independent clauses" but the moment a clause gains utility is when dependence is added to it. The only methods we have to express noncausal ideas are additive. Like an expansion pack for the English language, we just slap on some extra grammar and jargon, then call it good. It's a lot of messy boilerplate that we have to use every time we need abstraction. It's no wonder that we have ended up with doctor-speak and programmer jargon. This has me wondering: what if we did have first-class noncausal language? What would that even look like? How would we structure clauses? Is there even a way to do it, or is what I am proposing simply what one finds searching the antonym of causal itself: redundant, frivolous, irrelevant, or meaningless?
- fairity 4y agoThe rabbit hole goes deeper when you introduce the concepts of blame and responsibility. People all too often fully assign blame to one piece of the giant network of causes that result in an outcome.
- throw149102 4y agoMade me think of Markov chains, and the PageRank algorithm. We should construct causal graphs, then give each of them 1/n weight and iterate over the casual weight splitting out, until the Markov chain reaches a steady state. Then you know what is important causally and what isnt.
- fastaguy88 4y ago"Causal Explanations Considered Harmful" seems to clearly want to invoke Dijkstra's "GOTO statements considered harmful", which played an important role in changing programming style. But do we really want to see causal explanations to go the way of the "goto"? Good luck getting your car fixed, and god help you if you are ill. I'm more comfortable with the essay "superficial analyses considered harmful".
- m3047 4y agoI apologize this may sound a little strange, but let me ask: What if they said "sorry, we can't fix your car because it doesn't run"? What do you think of this quote? "To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead." What about the person who says "it worked yesterday" when yesterday they were using somebody else's computer? Just asking for your thoughts...
- satvikpendem 4y ago"Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916
- m3047 4y agoI view the article as aspirational, and a lot of the comments here seem to fetishize a trinity of time and certitude and causality. I appreciate attempts to explore diagramming, and so I appreciate the article. I am also informed by past exposure to Markov chains. I am aware of Prigogine, and so I accept that reasoning about a dynamic system relies on its dynamic state. A simple example would be: opening the gates causes water to be released from the dam But that's predicated on there being water captured behind the dam. Which requires rainfall. It also requires a dam. A different example would be: adding additional propellant makes it go faster This is reasonably straightforward construction for a projectile, less so for a jet engine or a piston engine which dynamically reaches the functional state which we wish to reason about. As for LSD, how did the author miss Tim Leary? Referring to a Leary personality diagnosis radar chart I can't find an obvious mapping in the dynamic of post vs comments. Best WAG is that neither is expressing dominance (both are seeking order and guidance), with the article more in the region of acceptance and the comments more in the range of suspicion and hostility.
- monsecchris 4y agoThe reason why we know having no father figure leads to a higher chance of committing violent crime is not some kind of guesswork of causality, it is because it is the best predictor. Dishonesty is considered harmful.