= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RichardKennaway comments on Smoking lesion as a counterexample to CDT - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (51)
At some point, you have to bring in domain knowledge of causation. How do you know that pushing on the accelerator will make the car go faster?
One can think up scenarios in which taxes do indirectly cause cancer (or lesions): higher tax on tobacco --> people continue to use tobacco but switch to some cheaper, less preferred foodstuffs --> among which is one that unknown to anyone yet causes cancer (or lesions). But the first of those links is observable. If they don't change their diet but do reduce their tobacco consumption, this chain is refuted.
For taxes causing reduced smoking, you could look at temporal relations, or ask people why they've cut down. If you find yourself inventing reasons why no-one can detect the dragon in your garage, at some point you have to accept that there is no dragon.
Evenly divide all people into two groups, and apply higher taxes to one group.
Changing taxes for everyone fails to test for a common cause of tax changes and smoking.
I can track a solid determimistic relationship from the accelerator pedal to the drivetrain. Deterministic cause and effect is easy to test. Stochastic cause and effect, much less so, especially with unknown confounding factors.
Best of luck getting that one to fly in practice.
That's the general problem with instrumental variables. But sometimes that's all you have to work with.
That is the fundamental problem of statistical experiments.
Well, it's just as easy as varying smoking directly, which would also work to identify a smoking->cancer effect.
Without experimentation, there is no way to distinguish between the world of smoker's lesion and the world of carcinogenic cigarettes.