Comments on: Can we infer causality from observational data? https://roundtable.nceas.ucsb.edu/2013/01/11/can-we-infer-causality-from-observational-data/ An information-sharing forum for the NCEAS community. Sun, 20 Jan 2013 06:10:58 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.9.5 By: sehampton https://roundtable.nceas.ucsb.edu/2013/01/11/can-we-infer-causality-from-observational-data/#comment-16 Sat, 19 Jan 2013 02:11:15 +0000 http://roundtable.nceas.ucsb.edu/?p=62262#comment-16 Inspired by Kara’s description of plankton science using the upgoer-five text editor – constraining text to the 1,000 most common words in English – I’ve attempted to sum up the discussion:

People who study stuff think they can learn what causes things to
happen, but maybe we can’t ever know if they are right. If you are
looking at one thing, another thing may be happening at the same time,
but you are not looking at it so you don’t know. Maybe something that
you weren’t looking at was really the cause. Maybe humans can’t know
what is real anyway. It’s still important to study stuff. And it is
agreed that a car that could move back through time, to times before
now, would help us to understand what causes things to change.

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