On Lead

Karl, I disagree.

A single causal factor may have been previously present, but constrained or buffered by other factors that have changed. Cancer is an example; it’s an epidemic in a single organism.

Some cancers are associated with multiple genetic defects. You can get cancer with any single defect, but your odds are much greater when you have many in tandem. Sometimes you have a few in the wild type, and then a mutation occurs in a single cell, which then becomes cancerous. There may be a dominant driver, but this can still be called multifactorial, and it doesn’t occur with just cancer.

Reality is complex and multifaceted. When someone cannot cope with reality, they devise simple-minded formulas like, “overwhelmingly the presumption should be that epidemics have a single precipitating factor.” Such a person has learned to deal with reality as a “model,” rather than as actual, concrete existence.

I liked this post when I first read it, but since then (maybe it’s too late to usefully comment) it’s been eating at me. I think the key was your use of the word ‘precipitating’ that kept me thinking.

It’s undeniably true that when an event has a precipitating cause, it wouldn’t happen in the absence of that cause. But the only thing that makes that precipitating cause more important is that it’s (sometimes) the one we can see most clearly in hindsight. So maybe it’s useful for pundits or economists trying to explain the past, but for people trying to influence the future, it is not useful at all.

Perhaps a simple analogy. Let’s say the pilot light on my furnace blew out, and now my house is full of gas. If the precipitating factor of a lit match is introduced, my house will explode. It would be crazy to say that to save my house, I must focus on protecting it from lit matches. I would do much better to open a window and vent the gas, so that a lit match will cease to be a potential precipitating cause.

A more metaphorical example that comes to mind is that of the little kids playing soccer. They know that the ball is the precipitating cause of a goal, so they all run after the ball in a line. This is highly ineffective in comparison to professional soccer players, who know that they can’t all focus on the precipitating cause; they need a multivariate strategy which involves setting up the secondary conditions that allow the precipitating cause to result in a goal.

Does the author know the difference between “its” and “it’s”?