Causality: The Path Forking Problem

forkingIt seems to me that humans don’t assess cause and effect very well; we had to invent the scientific method as a way of teasing out which causes of a particular effect are the important ones. That’s a comforting illusion for us, but causality is not a chain of events and causes, it’s more like a lattice-work stretching backward in time to the Big Bang. In practical terms, it doesn’t make much sense for us to answer “Why did the chicken cross the road?” with “The Big Bang” even though it’s true: we search for something we can pin it on immediately.

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It’s Just “Metadata”

I’ve always been suspicious of power.* One of the warning signs I’m especially alert to is when I see language being bent or waterboarded in the interest of obscuring facts, rather than clarifying them. When a new word suddenly begins to take on a heavily-freighted meaning, e.g: “ethnic cleansing” instead of “genocide” I immediately ask myself “why that word, and not the other perfectly useable words?” The sudden promotion of or carpet-bombing with a new term is often an indicator that someone has decided to start using a new word with a subtly different definition – basically, lying by redefining the truth.

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Causing Problems

I’m going to do a couple of postings about causality, because it seems to me that how humans experience causality is of paramount importance to a lot of ideas such as “free will”, responsibility, and knowledge.
Presenting a philosophical framework in which to defend these ideas, however, is beyond me – so I’m going to approach the discussion casually, and I’ll be less rigorous about terminology than I’d have to be if I were going to try to defend my thoughts against a full-on skeptical enquiry.

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Important Science

I am disappointed by America’s Test Kitchen Podcast. Not deeply, but slightly.

Listening to a few back-episodes there was a brief mention that the problem of making hard-boiled eggs that peel perfectly “is not understood.” These are the people who do experiments on all kinds of stuff – but perhaps the experiments they do in the test kitchen are all just a cover-project for eating lots of cake and spare ribs, or something.

After tackling this problem using science I wrote ATK a quick explanation, but I’m sure they don’t care. Because, if they did, they would have done some thinking and figured it out themselves. For the record: I don’t care either. I eat a lot of hard-boiled eggs, so it was an easy experiment to perform.

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