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Dagon 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.
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.