Couple of points. You say that “the human causal algorithm is frequently, horrifically, wrong”.
But remember here that we are discussing the human counterfactual algorithm, and my understanding of the experimental evidence re counterfactual reasoning (e.g. on cases like Kennedy or Gore) is that it is pretty consistent across human subjects, and between “naive” subjects (taken straight off the street) vs “expert” subjects (who have been thinking seriously about the matter). There is also quite a lot of consistency on what constitues a “plausible” versus a “far out” counterfactual, and much stronger sense about what happens in the cases with plausible antecedents than in cases with weird antecedents (such as what Caesar would have done if fighting in Korea). It’s also interesting that there are rather a lot of formal analyses which almost match the human algorithm, but not quite, and that there is quite a lot of consensus on the counter examples (that they genuinely are counter examples, and that the formal analysis gets it wrong).
What pretty much everyone agrees is that counterfactuals involving macro-variable antecedents assume some back-tracking before the time of the antecedent, and that a small micro-state change to set up the antecedent is more plausible than a sudden macro-change which involves breaks across multiple micro-states.
And on your other point, simple conditioning P(B | A) gives results more like the indicative conditional (“If Oswald did not shoot Kennedy, then someone else did”) rather than the counterfactual conditional (“If Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then no-one else would have”) .
Couple of points. You say that “the human causal algorithm is frequently, horrifically, wrong”.
But remember here that we are discussing the human counterfactual algorithm, and my understanding of the experimental evidence re counterfactual reasoning (e.g. on cases like Kennedy or Gore) is that it is pretty consistent across human subjects, and between “naive” subjects (taken straight off the street) vs “expert” subjects (who have been thinking seriously about the matter). There is also quite a lot of consistency on what constitues a “plausible” versus a “far out” counterfactual, and much stronger sense about what happens in the cases with plausible antecedents than in cases with weird antecedents (such as what Caesar would have done if fighting in Korea). It’s also interesting that there are rather a lot of formal analyses which almost match the human algorithm, but not quite, and that there is quite a lot of consensus on the counter examples (that they genuinely are counter examples, and that the formal analysis gets it wrong).
What pretty much everyone agrees is that counterfactuals involving macro-variable antecedents assume some back-tracking before the time of the antecedent, and that a small micro-state change to set up the antecedent is more plausible than a sudden macro-change which involves breaks across multiple micro-states.
And on your other point, simple conditioning P(B | A) gives results more like the indicative conditional (“If Oswald did not shoot Kennedy, then someone else did”) rather than the counterfactual conditional (“If Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then no-one else would have”) .
Granted. I’m a mathematician, not a cognitive scientist.