Pressing the gas pedal causes the car to move forward
@vineettiruvadi
Fascinating responses here. It’s very similar to Lauren Ross’s light switch example but w/ a different majority answer. (I won’t give away which is which).
@vineettiruvadi
Now that the poll is over (for anyone interested and especially those who said "no") this is similar to an example Lauren Ross uses to illustrate an "interventionist" account of causality.
https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~rossl/CS_PW.pdf
"Interventionist Criterion (IC) X has causal control over Y if and only if
there are circumstances S such that if some (single) intervention that
changes the value of X (and no other variable) were to occur in S, then
the value of Y or the probability distribution of Y would change.
In this framework, variables represent properties that can take on different
values and arrows represent relationships of direct causal control. Variables
are the relata of causal relationships, and they represent various properties of
interest. Suppose that variable X is a light switch on the wall, which can take
on one of two values (0,1) representing the switch being down or up. Variable Y represents a light bulb, which can take on the values (0,1) representing whether the light is off or on. The IC relies on the notion of an ideal intervention. An ideal intervention involves an unconfounded experimental
manipulation of X with respect to Y in which changes in Y are produced
by changes in X and not through any other variable. In other words, as
shown in figure 2, this intervention (a) is not correlated with another variable
W that has causal control over Y, (b) it does not directly have causal control
over Y, and (c) it does not have causal control over any of the intermediate
variables between X and Y. Intervening on the light switch in this manner
reveals that it has causal control over the light being on or off. In explaining
why the light is on or off, we appeal to the state of the switch, because it provides causal control over this outcome."
That definition aligns with causal inference ala Judea Pearl (and Konrad Kording). But also note that it's not the only way to think about causality:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35810023/
I do wonder for those that voted "no", whether causal production is the definition you are adopting or if it's something else?
@NicoleCRust @vineettiruvadi It seems to me that such definitions become tricky when the best description/model of a system may involve a very large number of variables (e.g. for the light switch, should the state of all the electrons at different times be considered variables?). Wouldn't changing the spatiotemporal description scale of the model drastically impact the conclusions about causality in this framework?
