[gwern]

> After he demonstrated this, I decided to try to help. I followed the wires that were wrapped. Two of them. To my surprise they were not connected at either end. This was insane, and yet his study - and my own observation - demonstrated that wrapping these two wires which were completely disconnected caused his car to start. Now there is causality for you.

You didn't show causality, though. You never randomized anything. His study and your observation was purely observational. At no point did you open the hood, get ready to wrap the wires, and flip a coin to decide whether to wrap the wires or do a placebo wrapping somewhere else.

Had you done that, you would have found, per your ultimate explanation, that the wrapping made no causal difference: you did the procedure, and either way, the car turned on. Hence, there is no causality for you.

[bwfan123]

imo, The idea of a cause is a logical concept of containment when used in theories. A causes B means the phenomena represented by A implies the phenomena represented by B. So, causation is a device of our symbolization and understanding of the world rather than anything fundamentally out there. this is of course a controversial view.

Causality eventually demands a "theory" for full explanatory power and understanding. Theories have premises, involve inference, and have predictions. Otherwise, we get ad-hoc models of phenomena via observations which is a great start, but ends up as an oversimplification. X causes Y but, what caused X or why did X cause Y and not Z ? models represent phenomena while theories explain them. we start with models, and then our curiosity eventually leads to a theory. refer [1] for a great read from a physicist turned quant.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Models-Behaving-Badly-Confusing-Illus...

[yccs27]

If I understand it correctly, they randomly decided to try starting the car immediately or to go wrap the wires first. This absolutely demonstrates a causality, they just didn't cleanly separate the different factors which changed.

Your comparison to placebo is very apt: Giving medication to a patient (vs not giving anything) causes them to get better, but it might be the "giving a pill" part instead of the "ingesting medication" part that matters.

[swores]

It doesn't show causality because their decision of when to do it wasn't random (so maybe when in the mood to go straight to wrapping wires they were also in the mood to turn the key slightly more firmly, or...), and also because there's no way of knowing if wrapping the wires was in any way relevant - maybe the vehicle actually just needed X minutes between unlocking and starting, and wrapping wires was a way to spend that time without using a timer, or maybe... who knows what other maybes!

And sure enough, their story concludes with discovering that there was no causality from the wire wrapping at all. It was just about killing time.