Often the best way to understand why other people do things we view as “irrational” is to notice why we do the same things. Or at least, what the closest thing is that we do, and why we do that.
In this case, you stopped at “I had a desk job”, and labeled that the root cause. You came up with “it’s outside the body!”, and rested on that to justify the halt.
But does “I had a desk job!” not have a cause? Might not the cause dip back into the system with something like “I wanted money, and that was the best paying job available”? Maybe the root cause is greed?
Why do you count “My internal decision making used my internal muscles to orient my neck in a certain way for hours per day” as “external”, but “lack of a high fiber prebiotic diet, the way my body evolved to expect” isn’t an external root cause? Lack of vitamin C is pretty clearly the “root cause” of scurvy, so this seems like a valid type of explanation. And once you notice that “lack of input” counts, even “lack of exogenous opioids” fits your criterion for a root cause of the pain — which it clearly isn’t.
The tree of causality has many branches, and it’s possible to intervene at any of them. The fire was caused by the fuel! No, by the oxygen! No, by the ignition source! Maybe a prebiotic diet would have fixed your stomach issue and things would have been fine. Maybe it would have been insufficient because you’d still have to fix your neck issues, but this criterion couldn’t tell you.
A “root cause” is a cause from which all other symptoms stem. Technically, there is no root as we can always keep going, but we can make pragmatic decisions about where to prune our representations of this tree of causality. Your “external to the body” heuristic, when applied intuitively as you do, is a heuristic. It is not the thing itself, and the “root cause” for a lot of rationality failures has to do with a failure to track this distinction, and giving in to the temptation to stamp our pragmatic decisions with the rational seal of approval.
Or at least, noticing that node does a lot for ya. The tree keeps going.
It’s a heuristic that works because it usually stops the mistake where you think you’ve identified the thing that’s wrong, but actually there’s another thing that you would like to know is wrong, but you don’t know it, in that if you found out about it, you’d be glad you found out about it.
The reason this works is that the human body is very complicated and unknown, and finding a cause outside the body means finding a cause that’s easier to reason about, like desk sitting or a toxic molecule that entered your body.
But it’s just a heuristic to help people avoid a common and dangerous mistake. Of course, the tree of causality can be traced back as far as you want, until you end up invoking the Big Bang.
Often the best way to understand why other people do things we view as “irrational” is to notice why we do the same things. Or at least, what the closest thing is that we do, and why we do that.
In this case, you stopped at “I had a desk job”, and labeled that the root cause. You came up with “it’s outside the body!”, and rested on that to justify the halt.
But does “I had a desk job!” not have a cause? Might not the cause dip back into the system with something like “I wanted money, and that was the best paying job available”? Maybe the root cause is greed?
Why do you count “My internal decision making used my internal muscles to orient my neck in a certain way for hours per day” as “external”, but “lack of a high fiber prebiotic diet, the way my body evolved to expect” isn’t an external root cause? Lack of vitamin C is pretty clearly the “root cause” of scurvy, so this seems like a valid type of explanation. And once you notice that “lack of input” counts, even “lack of exogenous opioids” fits your criterion for a root cause of the pain — which it clearly isn’t.
The tree of causality has many branches, and it’s possible to intervene at any of them. The fire was caused by the fuel! No, by the oxygen! No, by the ignition source! Maybe a prebiotic diet would have fixed your stomach issue and things would have been fine. Maybe it would have been insufficient because you’d still have to fix your neck issues, but this criterion couldn’t tell you.
A “root cause” is a cause from which all other symptoms stem. Technically, there is no root as we can always keep going, but we can make pragmatic decisions about where to prune our representations of this tree of causality. Your “external to the body” heuristic, when applied intuitively as you do, is a heuristic. It is not the thing itself, and the “root cause” for a lot of rationality failures has to do with a failure to track this distinction, and giving in to the temptation to stamp our pragmatic decisions with the rational seal of approval.
Or at least, noticing that node does a lot for ya. The tree keeps going.
It’s a heuristic that works because it usually stops the mistake where you think you’ve identified the thing that’s wrong, but actually there’s another thing that you would like to know is wrong, but you don’t know it, in that if you found out about it, you’d be glad you found out about it.
The reason this works is that the human body is very complicated and unknown, and finding a cause outside the body means finding a cause that’s easier to reason about, like desk sitting or a toxic molecule that entered your body.
But it’s just a heuristic to help people avoid a common and dangerous mistake. Of course, the tree of causality can be traced back as far as you want, until you end up invoking the Big Bang.