Some of Tetlock’s most recent research has used videogames for studying counterfactuals. I participated in both the Civ 5 and Recon Chess rounds. He is interested in prediction, but sees it as a form of counterfactual too. I don’t quite see the tension with Pearl’s framework, which is merely a manner of categorization in terms of logical priority, no?
This seems incorrect; due to confounders, you can have nontrivial conditionals despite trivial counterfactuals, and due to suppressors (and confounders too for that matter), you can have nontrivial counterfactuals despite trivial conditionals.
I think you might be right? Let me make sure I am understanding you correctly.
In A → B, If A is trivial, B can still be nontrivial, and vise versa? This makes sense to me.
I think you might be right? Let me make sure I am understanding you correctly.
In A → B, If A is trivial, B can still be nontrivial, and vise versa? This makes sense to me.
No, I mean stuff like:
Whether you have long hair does not causally influence whether you can give birth; if someone grew their hair out, they would not become able to give birth. So the counterfactuals for hair length on ability to give birth are trivial, because they always yield the same result.
However, you can use hair length to conditionally predict whether someone can give birth, since sex influences both hair length and ability to give birth. So the conditionals are nontrivial because the predicted ability to give birth depends on hair length.
Some of Tetlock’s most recent research has used videogames for studying counterfactuals. I participated in both the Civ 5 and Recon Chess rounds. He is interested in prediction, but sees it as a form of counterfactual too. I don’t quite see the tension with Pearl’s framework, which is merely a manner of categorization in terms of logical priority, no?
I think you might be right? Let me make sure I am understanding you correctly.
In A → B, If A is trivial, B can still be nontrivial, and vise versa? This makes sense to me.
No, I mean stuff like:
Whether you have long hair does not causally influence whether you can give birth; if someone grew their hair out, they would not become able to give birth. So the counterfactuals for hair length on ability to give birth are trivial, because they always yield the same result.
However, you can use hair length to conditionally predict whether someone can give birth, since sex influences both hair length and ability to give birth. So the conditionals are nontrivial because the predicted ability to give birth depends on hair length.