Math of Causation

Not to say we humans do this well either,  but if we hope to have machines do it we have to consider how.

Solution: ‘The Slippery Math of Causation’

The all-too-intuitive picture of a straight arrow going from cause to effect is far too simplistic to describe the real world.   By Pradeep Mutalik in Quanta

Our latest Insights puzzle attempted to model multifactorial causation with problems that involved three causal factors whose different types of interactions either produced or did not produce an effect. The goal was to challenge the all-too-intuitive picture of a straight arrow going from cause to effect as far too simplistic to describe the real world. In fact, a recent Quanta article by Veronique Greenwood describes the omnigenic model of complex traits, with the startling self-explanatory title “Theory Suggests That All Genes Affect Every Complex Trait.” The thinking that inspired our puzzle and is manifest in the omnigenic theory was captured visually by Paul Laurienti. In the diagram below, think of the genes as the causes and the complex traits as the effects, and you will see that it fits the new theory perfectly. Thank you, Paul!  .... "