it’s just much harder than I expected to make deductions like that
This is something I noticed from some earlier .scis! I forget which, now. My hypothesis was that finding underlying unmentioned causes was really hard without explicitly using causal machinery in your exploration process, and I don’t know how to, uh, casually set up causal inference, and it’s something I would love to try learning at some point. Like, my intuition is something akin to “try a bunch of autogenerated causal graphs, see if something about correlations says [these] could work and [those] probably don’t, inspect them visually, notice that all of [these] have a commonality”. No idea if that would actually pan out or if there’s a much better way. There’s a lot of friction in “guess maybe there’s an underlying cause, do a lot of work to check that one specific guess, anticipate you’d go through many false guesses and maybe even there isn’t such a thing on this problem”.
This is something I noticed from some earlier .scis! I forget which, now. My hypothesis was that finding underlying unmentioned causes was really hard without explicitly using causal machinery in your exploration process, and I don’t know how to, uh, casually set up causal inference, and it’s something I would love to try learning at some point. Like, my intuition is something akin to “try a bunch of autogenerated causal graphs, see if something about correlations says [these] could work and [those] probably don’t, inspect them visually, notice that all of [these] have a commonality”. No idea if that would actually pan out or if there’s a much better way. There’s a lot of friction in “guess maybe there’s an underlying cause, do a lot of work to check that one specific guess, anticipate you’d go through many false guesses and maybe even there isn’t such a thing on this problem”.