[nonbel]

>"If I look at all the alcoholic families in my municipality and compare their case history with big data gathered on a national level, I’ll certainly be able to predict how many of their children we’ll need to remove. I just can’t predict which ones because determinism doesn’t actually work on something that complex. [...] I think we need to learn from the social sciences, because they work much more with the complicated science behind the why."

Huh? ML classifiers will definitely give you a prediction for each individual case. Its the social sciences that have been choosing to look at an average effect at one single timepoint, etc and trying to get some kind of causal model from that (a dumb idea in my opinion since causality is working at the individual level).

EDIT:

I should also say I am open to the idea that causality isn't a real, or at least interesting, thing anyway. Eg PV = nRT, does that mean changing pressure changes the temperature or vice versa?

[SiempreViernes]

The gas law is a equilibrium condition, so if you change one the others must change too. But they don’t change spontaneously, you impose the change from without, so there is no ambiguity: whatever you force to change first will be the cause of the others changing.

[nonbel]

Right, the model accounts for all possible "causal routes", turning causality into something subjective.