Oh I see, yeah this sounds hard. The causal graph wouldn’t be a DAG because it’s cyclic, in which case there may be something you can do but the “standard” (read: what you’d find in Pearl’s Causality) won’t help you unless I’m forgetting something.
An apparently real hypothesis that fits this pattern is that people take more risks / do more unhealthy things the more they know healthcare can heal them / keep them alive.
Oh I see, yeah this sounds hard. The causal graph wouldn’t be a DAG because it’s cyclic, in which case there may be something you can do but the “standard” (read: what you’d find in Pearl’s Causality) won’t help you unless I’m forgetting something.
An apparently real hypothesis that fits this pattern is that people take more risks / do more unhealthy things the more they know healthcare can heal them / keep them alive.
The thermostat pattern is everywhere, from biology to econ to climate etc. I learned about it years ago from this article and it affected me a lot.