HM: In the 1970s, there was an article in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives by Gary Ter Haar that stated basically paint was causing the major pollution of lead in urban soils. When we looked at Baltimore, the pattern we were finding was the opposite of what you would expect. It turns out Gary Ter Haar worked for the Ethyl Corporation [which manufactured the lead additive for gasoline]. There was a huge conflict of interest. The idea of paint being the major contributor of lead to the soil came from people who had a very long vested interest in not letting the cat of the bag.”

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/12/soil-lead-researcher-howard-mielke

Provided that you maintain this quality. I am sure you can have a
lot of followers in no time.
All the best, and definitely checking for your future posts.

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.

Forget Aunt Minnie. What was the single factor we should fix next time to avoid a recession occurring for the same reason this one did?

What single factor should have been rectified to avoid World War I? If your answer is “protect Archduke Franz Ferdinand at all costs”, you’re conceding my point.

Seems to me like a person probably only cares about the deeper causality if they believe that it would be cheaper to fix the problem earlier in the chain, or if they believe there are other related problems that are conditional to the deeper cause…

…and in fact there probably are deeper causes and related problems, but the further away you get from the effect, the harder it is to say whether those deeper causes aren’t also beneficial in other ways that we fail to think of.

If we had the ability to re-design water so that it doesn’t expand when it solidifies, that would save a lot of Aunties from falling. But it’d probably be disastrous for life as we know it. It’s hard to tell apriori.

Usually, the safest and cheapest thing to fix is the single “precipitating factor”.

But to me that seems people usually care about the causative factors: what happened to cause this thing, so we can prevent it next time? In that case, it’s a mistake to single out one event when there are many equal contributors. Not just in cancer, but in recessions and crime too.

Study random matrix theory. The distribution of eigenvalues of a random matrix are distributed in a highly correlated way. Small changes in the matrix elements can cause large shifts in the eigenvalues and thus small events can lead to big effects which can only be understood as the sum of a large number of different forces.

Now, sure it is possible to examine the matrix in a coordinate frame in which the eigenvectors are the forces. Then, it all looks like it is being caused by a single force, but there is nothing – nothing at all – to ensure or even make it likely that the eigenvector is a simple combination of more fundamental driving forces.

It’s a snappy quote, though.

However, if you were inside the body watching one particular epidemic unfold you would say: “It all started with cell X when Y happened”

Also we are dealing with a population of some 10 Trillion cells some of which have a rapid turnover, so the odds of hitting two necessary factors over the entire life time of the organism is fairly high. Though, even still you would probably say it all started with cell X when Y happened.

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.

I really wish I could find that paper again. It was linked to in some blog, might have been Ezra Klein’s but can’t find it right now.