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G0W51 comments on Open thread, Sep. 21 - Sep. 27, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Where can one find information on the underlying causes of phenomena? I have noticed that most educational resources discuss superficial occurrences and trends but not their underlying causes. For example, this Wikipedia article discusses the happenings in the Somali Civil War but hardly discusses the underlying motivations of each side and why the war turned out how it did. Of course, such discussions are often opinionated and have no clear-cut answers, perhaps making Wikipedia a sub-optimal place for them.
I know LW might not be the best place to ask this, but my intuition suggests that LWers may care more about this deeper-level understanding, so may be able to suggest resources.
In social sciences the "causes" depend on your preferred analysis framework and are often highly contentious.
For a "deeper-level understanding" I'd recommend reading many viewpoints which disagree with each other.
What kind of phenomena are we talking about? You should specify if you're referring more narrowly to social and historical phenomena, because that's where the biggest gaps between what one can say on the surface about them and what actually drove them are. It's also a very murky area in regards to specifying causality.
The only reasonably effective method I've tried for this is to first read the Wikipedia article, to get an overview of the objective facts, events, numbers and so on, then try to find press articles about the topic, which are less objective but include more details.
Typically academic books and papers are the only places that really try to identify cause and effect at a level of abstraction that makes you think you understand. Be aware, of course, that neither they nor you can actually understand it - human behavior is complex enough that we can't model individual choices very well, let alone the sum of billions of individual choices that add up to societal "phenomena" like wars and demographic shifts and stock market blips.
Read about causal inference.
I don't see how this would really help unless I am trying to do original research.
What are you trying to do?
There are a lot of gotchas w/ causality. Lots of wikipedia info is wrong, etc.
If your thought process is "I want to learn about causes of things, but this seems like an awful lot of math..." consider that you may need to internalize some (not all!) of this math before you can talk about causes properly at all. It's like physics. Physics is handy, but there's some math. It's probably a good idea to learn a bit of physics if you are interested in the physical world, even if you aren't interested in doing original physics research.
I can generally point you in the right direction, but this will take some work from you, also.
Don't worry, I don't mind math. Alas, I mainly have difficulty understanding why people act how they do, so I doubt mathematics will help much with that. I think I'm going to take the suggestion someone gave of reading more textbooks. A psychology course should also help.