I recently read gwern’s excellent “Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation” notes, and, like any good reading, felt a profound sense of existential terror that caused me to write up a few half-formed thoughts on it. How exciting!
It may not be directly related, but I’d like to highlight that I just added a new section contextualizing the essay as a whole and explaining how it connects to the rest of my beliefs about correlation & causality: https://www.gwern.net/Causality#overview-the-current-situation
It may not be directly related, but I’d like to highlight that I just added a new section contextualizing the essay as a whole and explaining how it connects to the rest of my beliefs about correlation & causality: https://www.gwern.net/Causality#overview-the-current-situation
As for the broader question of where do our ontologies come from: I’d take a pragmatic point of view and point out that they must have evolved like the rest of us because thinking is for actions.