Quotes About Causality

Right here" is the reality of interdependent origination, the reality in which everything, including human beings, exists within the vast network of causes and conditions.

In complex systems, after all, it is very hard to foresee or predict the consequences of presumed causes. So it is not the consequences that we should be afraid of (we might not even foresee them or believe them if we could). Rather, we should be weary of renaming things that negotiate their perceived risk down from what it was before.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.

If there's anything worse than visualizing your own death, it's knowing that you caused it.

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

Descubre muchas cosas el científico; descubre muchas cosas que están sucediendo en el mundo, que son, al principio, comienzos de cadenas causales, primeras causas que no tienen causa en sí mismas. No supone que todo tiene una causa.

Zeno believed that there is no such thing as chance, and that the course of nature is rigidly determined by natural laws.

When two things have frequently existed in close temporal contiguity, either comes in time to cause the other.

The great thing about baseball is the causality is easy to determine and it always falls on the shoulders of one person. So there is absolute responsibility. That's why baseball is psychologically the cruelest sport and why it really requires psychological resources to play baseball - because you have to learn to live with failure.

If I could sum up the message of this book in one pithy phrase, it would be that you are smarter than your data. Data do not understand causes and effects; humans do.

while probabilities encode our beliefs about a static world, causality tells us whether and how probabilities change when the world changes, be it by intervention or by act of imagination.

you are smarter than your data. Data do not understand causes and effects; humans do.

The two fundamental questions of causality are: (1) What empirical evidence is required for legitimate inference of cause–effect relationships? (2) Given that we are willing to accept causal information about a phenomenon, what inferences can we draw from such information, and how?

Despite heroic efforts by the geneticist Sewall Wright (1889–1988), causal vocabulary was virtually prohibited for more than half a century. And when you prohibit speech, you prohibit thought and stifle principles, methods, and tools.

I hope with this book to convince you that data are profoundly dumb. Data can tell you that the people who took a medicine recovered faster than those who did not take it, but they can't tell you why. Maybe those who took the medicine did so because they could afford it and would have recovered just as fast without it.

With Bayesian networks, we had taught machines to think in shades of grey, and this was an important step toward humanlike thinking. But we still couldn't teach machines to understand causes and effects. We couldn't explain to a computer why turning the dial of a barometer won't cause rain.... Without the ability to envision alternate realities and contrast them with the currently existing reality, a machine...cannot answer the most basic question that makes us human: "Why?

overrate it in the sense that they often control for many more variables than they need to and even for variables that they should not

Everything we do, I'd imagine, influences everything we will do.

Monocausality reduces the study of history to meaningless simplicities (p.14).

Taleb argued that the limitations of the human brain resulted in our species' tendency to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understandable narratives.

Y si lo piensas, verás que, aunque creamos que tomamos decisiones equivocadas, seguramente todo habría acabado como acabó. Habríamos llegado al mismo punto en que estamos.

You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does.

Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements of science insofar as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and, hence, a clear formulation of the law of causality.

You may try to trace how a thing happens, but you cannot find out why a thing is as it is. A thing is as it is because the universe is as it is.