Yeah, that all seems fair/right/good and I see what you’re getting at. I got nerdsniped by the current source example because it was familiar and I felt as phrased it got in the way of the core idea you were going for.
The person who properly introduced me to Pearl’s causality stuff had an example which seems good here and definitely erodes the notion of causality being uni-directional in time. It seems equivalent to the thermostat one, I think.
Suppose I’m a politician seeking election:
At time t0, I campaign on a platform which causes people to vote for me at time t1.
On one hand, my choice of campaign is seemingly the cause of people voting for me afterwards.
On another hand, I chose the platform I did because of an action which would occur afterwards, i.e. the voting. If I didn’t have a model that people would vote for a given platform, I wouldn’t have chosen that platform. My model/prediction is of a real-world thing. So it kinda seems a bit like the causality flows backwards in time. The voting causes the campaign choice same as the temperature changing in response to knob-turning causes the knob-turning.
I like the framing that the questions can be posed both for voltage supply and current supply, that seems more on track to me.
Yeah, that all seems fair/right/good and I see what you’re getting at. I got nerdsniped by the current source example because it was familiar and I felt as phrased it got in the way of the core idea you were going for.
The person who properly introduced me to Pearl’s causality stuff had an example which seems good here and definitely erodes the notion of causality being uni-directional in time. It seems equivalent to the thermostat one, I think.
Suppose I’m a politician seeking election:
At time t0, I campaign on a platform which causes people to vote for me at time t1.
On one hand, my choice of campaign is seemingly the cause of people voting for me afterwards.
On another hand, I chose the platform I did because of an action which would occur afterwards, i.e. the voting. If I didn’t have a model that people would vote for a given platform, I wouldn’t have chosen that platform. My model/prediction is of a real-world thing. So it kinda seems a bit like the causality flows backwards in time. The voting causes the campaign choice same as the temperature changing in response to knob-turning causes the knob-turning.
I like the framing that the questions can be posed both for voltage supply and current supply, that seems more on track to me.
Positive reinforcement for noticing getting nerdsniped and mentioning it!