Quotes About Causality

We might think that by tossing a ball we initiate an action, but this is merely an arbitrary point in a beginningless line of action.

Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events.

Correlation does not equal causality. When two things travel together, it is tempting to assume that one causes the other. Married people, for instance, are demonstrably happier than single people; does this mean that marriage causes happiness? Not necessarily. The data suggest that happy people are more likely to get married in the first place. As one researcher memorably put it, "If you're grumpy, who the hell wants to marry you?

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt

La disposición de causas y consecuencias de este mundo es tan inescrutable que un impuesto de dos peniques sobre el té, aplicado injustamente en una parte aislada, cambia la condición de todos sus habitantes.»

You have to jump around in time to get the facts right. Linear chronology makes for good popular storytelling, but it doesn't always capture the deep causes that drive history. Some causes are proximate, in the moment. Some are echoes of distant shock waves, still reverberating a hundred—or a thousand—years later.

The typical imperative from biology is not Thou shalt... , but If ... then ... else.

There's a pattern here. In summing up the language of matter, space, and time, I concluded that they are measured by human goals, not just by a scale, a clock, and a tape measure. Now we see that the fourth major category in conceptual semantics, causality, also cares about our intentions and interests.

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.

being happy might make people supportive, generous, and conscientious rather than the other way around.

As always, the challenge is to find an exogenous change that precedes the change in sensibilities and behavior so we can avoid the circularity of saying that people stopped doing cruel things because they got less cruel.

What's good for humanity is not always good for social science, and it may be impossible to unsnarl the bundle of correlations among all the ways that life has improved and trace the causal arrows with certainty.

Prosaically, such sacrifice—work—is delay of gratification, but that's a very mundane phrase to describe something of such profound significance. The discovery that gratification could be delayed was simultaneously the discovery of time and, with it, causality (at least the causal force of voluntary human action). Long ago, in the dim mists of time, we began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with.

Incompetent and corrupt intellectuals thrive on such activity, such games. The first players of a given game of this sort are generally the brightest of the participants. They weave a story around their causal principle of choice, demonstrating how that hypothetically primary motivational force profoundly contributed to any given domain of human activity.

What my client was perceiving—at least as far as she was concerned—was not a single event, hypothetically capable of heading those involved in it down a dangerous path, but a clearly identifiable and causally related variety or sequence of events, all heading in the same direction. Those events seemed to form a coherent pattern, associated with an ideology that was directional in its intent, explicitly and implicitly.

Ángel de la jiribilla, ruega por nosotros. Y sonríe. Obliga a que suceda. Enseña una de tus alas, lee: Realízate, cúmplete, sé anterior a la muerte. Repite: Lo imposible al actuar sobre lo posible, engendra un posible en la infinidad. Ya la imagen ha creado una causalidad, es el alba de la era poética entre nosotros. Ahora ya sabemos que la única certeza se engendra en lo que nos rebasa.

All the Sacraments, as acts of their invis ible author and chief minister, Jesus Christ, by vir tue of their immanent dignity, move God to the (physical) production of grace, and hence exert at least a moral causality.

Every event has a cause--that is ... for every event e1 there exists an event e2 (or a class of events e2, e3 ...) which precedes e1 and of which e1 is a necessary consequence.... If we assent to this statement then your "choice" to do A rather than B, whatever may have been at the time your sensation of freedom from any constraint, was entirely necessitated. You could not have done otherwise and hence, according to this conception of freedom, were not free.

the popular conception of the gene as a simple causal agent is not valid. The idea that there is a gene for adventurousness, heart disease, obesity, religiosity, homosexuality, shyness, stupidity, or any other aspect of mind or body has no place on the platform of genetic discourse.

This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not. This is like this, because that is like that." This is the Buddhist teaching of Genesis.

Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number of past causes which we may assign to it, this past itself comes into being only with the event itself.

What is already woven cannot be undone. It will not make the trees grow again for you to bring the building down on our heads.