Tag Archives: Causality

A key difficulty here is that, even though interactions are clearly all over the place, they’re hard to estimate. Remember, you need 16 times the sample size to estimate an interaction than to estimate a main effect. So, along with accepting the importance of interactions, we also have to accept inevitable uncertainty in their estimation. We have to move away from the idea that a statistical analysis will give us effective certainty for the things we care about. "Representative agents" are...

"Pareidolia" refers to the common human practice of looking at random outcomes but trying to impose patterns on them. For example, we all know in the logical part of our brain that there are a roughly a kajillion different variables in the world, and so if we look through the possibilities, we will will have a 100% chance of finding some variables that are highly correlated with each other. These correlations will be a matter of pure chance, and they carry no meaning. But when my own brain,...

Causality is one of the fundamental problems in philosophy, covering epistemology, philosophy of language, semiotics, and philosophy of science. Since causality is the basis of explanation, it applies to all aspects of understanding and theorizing, as Aristotle pointed out in his Metaphysics millennia ago. Yet, there is still no complete understanding of causality that would end controversy.There many interrogatives — who, what, when, where, how and why, for example. Description involves...

So how does Mankiw answer the question he raises in his first sentence: “What caused the financial crisis of 2008?” He does not answer it. He not even explain why he does not answer his own question. New Economic PerspectivesMankiw Whiffs on “Learning the Right Lessons from the Financial Crisis”William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Not a priority but of interest if for those who want to know more about how organizations deal with causation by analyzing the concrete in terms of the abstract.  This is related to what Hegel called "concrete universal, and Marx defined as "concrete abstraction." This is the basis of the dialect for Hegel and Marx's adoption and adaptation of it.A Philosopher's TakeCauses in Real Life – How Organizations Perform a Root Cause Analyses (RCA) Mike Steiner | Strategic Initiative Specialist...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Causal Friday: But What About All The People Who Didn’t Declare Bankruptcy?: no, I will never get tired of either bad puns or talking about causality.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Causal Friday: But What About All The People Who Didn’t Declare Bankruptcy?: no, I will never get tired of either bad puns or talking about causality.

Everyone is familiar with the nostrum, "correlation is not causality." Simply put, correlation can potentially identify input-output relationships with a certain degree of probability. But the relationship is a "black box."Causal explanation involves opening the box and examining the contents. Correlation shows that something happens; causality in science explains how it happens, elucidating transmission in terms of operations. In formal systems the operators are rules, e.g., expressible...

Important. I think Noah has this right. Fit the tool to the job, rather than the job to the tool. Aristotle defined speculative knowledge in terms of causal explanation. This definition stuck although Aristotle's analysis of causality did not. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle places the following crucial condition on proper knowledge: we think we have knowledge of a thing only when we have grasped its cause (APost. 71 b 9–11. Cf. APost. 94 a 20). That proper knowledge is knowledge...

Steve Levitt, in addition to gaining fame (at least at an economist level, not a Justin Bieber level) for writing Freakonomics, has made a career teasing cause and effect out of (largely) observational data. (By “observational data,” I mean that he doesn’t explicitly run controlled experiments in a lot of cases and just looks at the world as it transpired naturally instead.) Observational data presents an interesting challenge because people usually make choices in life rather than being...