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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

It'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.

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> 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.

I think you're missing most of the point of those diagrams, and the concept of feedback loops in general.

Yes, the cause cannot happen before the effect. But there was no singular "LSD" event in 1968 and no singular "hippies" event in 1969 - the two phenomena were feeding on each other over time. 1968 and 1969 are just years in which people now agree the phenomena crossed some notability thresholds.

Both here and in the general case, in such feedback loops you often won't know what the original cause was - the starting point has been lost to history, and the earliest records you can find are already from when the feedback loop already started. Did some random person ingest some LSD and, because of the experience, became the very first OG hippe? Or did the OG hippie do some LSD with their friends, and the shared experience made those friends more susceptible to the hippie ideas? Who knows?

Then there's an issue of boundaries. Even if you can point at some concrete events in time, like e.g. date of founding a company, it's probably not what you're looking for anyway. That decision itself is a discrete outcome of a different feedback system that's been running for some time, and that feedback system - not the singular signing of a document - provided the influences you're really looking for.

Just want to say that this is the type of comment we want less of. Well over 75% of it is name calling, and the rest can barely be called an argument, let alone an effective one.

That's funny, because that's what I say about them. As I see it, I'm not calling them names, I'm merely saying I think their arguments are shoddy and not at all persuasive.

> 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.

One hippie in 1986 could have ~dreams of a massive population of newly minted hippies in 1969 (in this case: virtual hippies), and that dream could motivate them to manufacture and distribute LSD in pursuit of that goal.

Lots of causality is due to false beliefs, and at the cognitive level distortion of time may be just another distortion. What time "is" is to some degree a bit hand wavy in the first place, isn't it?

Causal 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.

By that logic if for whatever reason you skip breakfast tomorrow, a non-existent thing will have been a cause of your actions.

The 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.

Your 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.

Thoughts 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.

The idea of tomorrow's breakfast causes today's shopping. You're probably right that tomorrow you'll need to eat breakfast, but you might not be.

>Tomorrow's breakfast causes todays shopping.

This is a logical inconsistency. Tomorrow's breakfast does not yet exist, only your "knowing" about it. Your thought has already happened today, therefore "knowing" you will be hungry is the true cause, not the potential for breakfast itself.

Also Vietnam vets and LSD-fueled hippies exist in the same set, and each can have effects that go in different directions.

On top of that, merging their effects (in policy setting for example) sort of is a barrier to attributing causality. It forces a 2 dimensional signal to go to 1 dimension. Neural networks can backpropagate attribution through that, but only with the convention that this attribution is the marginal effect. And that's a complex problem: who would be responsible for a policy change when there's a population contributing long-term for 48%, but a short term population adds 4%. Which population is the real cause? the 48% or the 4%? Is there a right answer to this question?

As David Hume points out, you don't actually know you'll be hungry tomorrow. You assume you will be based on induction from similar past events, but this is not certain. (He does concede that it's reasonable to plan as if it were a certainty in such cases, in the absence of any falsifying evidence.)

The famous counterexample metaphor is farmyard turkeys. For months, for their entire lives, the turkeys observe the diligent farmer bringing food and water, providing for their every need so that they don't have to do anything. On the day before Thanksgiving, a turkey philosopher confidently declares that, based on this prior evidence, we can conclude that the farmer, their great benefactor, exists only to serve and further the interests of turkeydom.

Perfect. The philosopher turkey views the past as causing the future while in fact the farmer’s future meal caused the turkey’s past experiences. A great example of how serious an error rejecting reverse causality can be.

The turkey is simply wrong in its inductive reasoning. Your hunger tomorrow will be a consequence of the forward causal process of metabolism. That the turkey's demise occurs specifically on thanksgiving day is partly determined by a cultural attitude having its origin in past events.

Aristotle, of course, used a broader ontology of causes than is commonly used today, but there should be no confusion if we are careful to define what we mean. In particular, final causes are more commonly regarded as psychological attitudes, whereby if someone acts now to bring about a certain circumstance in the future, the circumstance is caused by what they were thinking prior to the action.

Hume uses the example of the sun rising: though the sun has (so far) always risen in the east, there is no logical reason to assume that it will _necessarily_ do the same tomorrow tomorrow. Though we can reasonably plan for this as the most likely scenario based on available evidence, it is not _necessarily_ going to happen.

There is, likewise, no logically necessary reason to assume that that causal process of metabolism will continue to work tomorrow as it always has in the past, though it is indeed reasonable to prepare for that outcome as the most likely outcome.

That is true, but here I am discussing the different issue (raised by simple-thoughts) of whether causality can work backwards in time.

If someone buys something to eat at breakfast tomorrow, but dies before then, there was no future event to cause the purchase.

Your past experiences have caused you to expect you'll be hungry tomorrow, but shy of someone building a time machine there's no way for causal relationships to actually go backwards. If you wake up tomorrow craving bacon there's no mechanism for you to cause your past self to pick some up.

> Scott A. and the author he reviews seem to thrive a little too well in the world of muddy explanations.

The problem of this causal explanation perhaps lies with the source material Scott Alexander cited without adequate critical analysis, namely David Brooks’ _BoBos in Paradise_.

“If Books Could Kill”, co-hosted by Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri, analyzes and humorously takes down book-length transgressions against critical thinking. A recent episode adroitly and conclusively disassembles Brooks’ _BoBos in Paradise_ as quite harmful and comically wrongheaded. [0]

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id...

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