Naftali Weinberger

This edition featuring keynotes by: Karoline Wiesner, Mats Stensrud & Naftali Weinberger (@dagophile.bsky.social)!

Folks, some news. No, not that kind of news – what do you think this is, LinkedIn? It's this:

1. The applied causal graphs workshop deadline is 28th Feb. so get your abstracts in and hang out with us in Potsdam this May. Form and description is below

2. @dagophile.bsky.social is giving a keynote 🥳

😄. As it happens I'm finishing up a draft of a paper in which I argue that causality is at least as fundamental as thermodynamics. So that seems pretty general.

I'm having so much fun writing this paper! For too long I was too intimidated to engage in depth with the philosophy of physics literature, but since the general quality of work in it is so high, that eases the entry into the conversation.

James Rebhorn - Wikipedia

Has anyone explored the possibility that the decline of the film industry is solely due to the irreplaceable loss of James Rebhorn in 2014?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R...

The Score by C. Thi Nguyen: 9780593655658 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books A philosophy of games to help us win back control over what we value The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen—one of the leading experts on the philosophy of games and the philosophy of data—takes us...

With the precision of a philosopher and the geekiness of a game-lover, Thi Nguyen shows how gaming has quietly colonized the rest of our lives. Required reading for understanding how values are being redefined through metrics, rankings, and scoring. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252...

To be clear, to suppose that causal claims have counterfactual content is not to imply that causes reduce to counterfactuals (à la Lewis).

So I think Will is right to be skeptical of process theories beyond physics. And even "within" physics we should be skeptical that they work.

You can still ask whether there are any well defined causal relationships for which one cannot specify a counterfactual contrast in the cause. If causation implies manipulability, then no, but this is unresolved. But we should be skeptical of process theories as providing an adequate analysis...

I think Chris Hitchcock nailed this. My takeaway: process theories either have to appeal to counterfactuals (e.g. ability to transmit a mark) or are unable to capture the causal asymmetry (conserved quantity theories). Of course...

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

So much stupid stuff happens when your institutions are motivated by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is getting something they don't deserve.

...when you look back at the series, you see that the character's perceived homosexuality is already mentioned in the first 20 minutes or so of the first episode, and throughout that entire season. So it's funny to see die hard fans talking as if this is some radical shift.

"Stranger Things" Chapter Seven: The Bridge (TV Episode 2025) ⭐ 5.4 | Drama, Fantasy, Horror 1h 6m | TV-14

I'm kind of fascinated by the attempt to tank the score on this (see the number of 1 scores). What corner of the internet is spearheading this? And am I just revealing my coastal liberal bubble when I wonder if it's a response to the coming out scene? Also,...

www.imdb.com/title/tt2191...

Very cool! I'm curious whether you've come across this paper, which is not at all technical, but which I find interesting to think about from a modeling perspective.

www.jstor.org/stable/40267...

Thanks for the shout out! I'll get back to posting in the New Year so any suggestions for future episode topics would definitely be welcome.

Fair. Though don’t forget In Bruges, which is clearly the best Christmas Movie.

Baubles, branches, some fancy decoration on Z4, and a Z1 that always knew it was a star.

What's this? Another confounded tree? 10/10 and a very merry Multistage Simpson's Paradox Machine* from all of us here at WeRateDAGs!

*Pearl, J. (2014) 'Comment: Understanding Simpson’s Paradox' The American Statistician, 68(1):8-13

I imagine you might have heard of the studies suggesting that fetuses start picking up the rhythm of a language in utero? I have no idea how well substantiated it is, but apparently French babies and German babies differ in when their voice rises while crying, in a way that mimics the languages.

Very cool. I never thought about prosody since I started learning languages as an adult (esp. German). It's really subtle and almost never properly explained (except by Deutsch mit Benjamin on Youtube). It also feels linked to the usage of flavoring particles (e.g. "halt" in DE or "even" in Dutch).

Yup. That’s the history of science in a nutshell. Start with modeling the stable planetary orbits, and then turn to the truly hard stuff.

he's right that certain policies will be self-undermining in the long scale, but this doesn't mean that the relevant causal parameters might not have some invariance at the relevant time-scale. In any event, it is certainly true that people don't think about this enough.

the speed at which you think people will adjust to (predictions about the equilibrium effect of) the policy. If you're primed to model all agents as rational agents with full information, you envision this adjustment as almost immediate. So...

I haven't seen this highlighted in discussions of the Lucas Critique, but is seems to me that the degree to which you should take it to undermine the effectiveness of public policy interventions is inversely proportional to...

Signs that the author knows the person they're citing -- accidentally using the first name :)

It's astonishing how a technology called artificial intelligence has revealed the actual stupidity of so many people. This tweet hasn't been bettered

I think I need to write something on "over-control" -- cases where the ability to fine-grain intervene reduces the variance (i.e. risk aversion) in a way that's long-term suboptimal. Very related to Alison's work on children exploring (vs. exploiting), and I'm starting to see it everywhere.

Frame by Frame Optimization vs systems-level synthesis

Some cybernetic blogging to kick off the holidays: why does framing decision, design, and discovery as optimization remain so irresistible?

So I’m more implying that in a better world philosophers would work on it (and still be able to get jobs)

They haven’t. There’s of course been some thoughts on the causal status of demographic variables, but these are basically race and gender 100% of the time. I’m right now talking w Betsy Ogburn and Reuben Stern about the causal status of time, but not APC specifically

😂. The issue of disentangling the causal effects of age is conceptually rich, and entirely untouched by philosophers.

The richest man in the world has killed hundreds of thousands of the poorest children in the world

I think this is one of the most evil--and definitely the most anti-christian--acts in human history