Determining causality

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BeeCuz

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A pharmaceutical company is sued for allegedly selling drugs that don't work. The defense attorney pleads causality is difficult to determine: Would the pharmaceutical company win that argument?

In Stephen Wolfram's dissertation on physics, he enunciates a definition of causality of events as
one event may not be able to happen yet because the input it needs has to come from the output of some other event ... a temporal ordering of events.
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The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, Judea Pearl, 2018 (p10)
How then can we express our strong conviction that it is the pressure that causes the barometer to change and not the other way around? And if we cannot express even this, how can we hope to express the many other causal convictions that do not have mathematical formulas, such as that the rooster’s crow does not cause the sun to rise?
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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.
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This is not really a mathematical question. Physicists may have their own answer to it; sadly, I am abysmally ignorant of physics.

My academic training was in history (and languages). And there we have the “problem of Cleopatra’s nose.” Marc Antony became smitten by Cleopatra and lost the war to Augustus, thereby leading to the formation of Imperial Rome. Are we to say that history is caused by the vagaries of middle-aged men’s romantic obsessions? Seems implausible.

Hume said cause and effect was “wonted succession in time.” That is a good first step, and it solves the problem of Cleopatra’s nose: people do strange things when in the grips of romantic infatuation, but it seldom is of significance militarily. There is nothing ”wonted“ about the attraction of men to beautiful women and the formation of multi-national states.

But Hume does not take care of roosters and sunrise. When I try to think historically, I look for repeated instances of succession in time and a plausible mechanism of action. Without both, I tend to think correlation without presuming cause and effect.

EDIT By the way, roosters and sunrise would be a great candidate for experiment, a luxury denied to historians.
 
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My cat understands the sound of a can opener leads to food.
Surely we as humans can do better than claim just because [imath]P(cancer|smoker)>P(cancer)[/imath] doesn't mean that smoking causes cancer.
 
BeeCuz said:
My cat understands the sound of a can opener leads to food.
Surely we as humans can do better than claim just because [imath]P(cancer|smoker)>P(cancer)[/imath] doesn't mean that smoking causes cancer.
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First of all, not everyone claims that. Those who claimed that do not know the difference between correlation and causation.
Not all smokers get cancer and not all cancers are caused by smoking.
 
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