Hi and welcome to classical stuff you should know this is a podcast about classical things literature books philosophy everything you should have learned in school But probably didn't I am AJ Hennenberg and I am joined by my buddies Thomas Magby Hello and Graham Donaldson Hello and two out of three of us work at a school down here in Austin, Texas We all three used to work out worked there, but Thomas has moved on to do Matthew things for Matthew folks I was I was hanging out with a friend over the break and they commented you point this out every time we start the episode Like I'm the one who left here toss it makes me laugh well We used to say we all work at the place and I know I just pull that out of the intro one of us because no longer with us Anyway, here I am. I'm here. I'm trying to do it as a like you're moving on to new and better things Oh, hey fair toss is a great place. I wouldn't say that but um yes.
Yes. Yes. Do you want some more? Uh as I've undercut your entire introduction.
Nope. I think that's good. So take it away Thomas. So we're back from Christmas I'll get there back.
So happy holidays. Happy year. Yep. 2022.
Let's get her get pitter-patter. Let's get out of here Did you just make that up? Is that a pitter-patter? Let's get out of here.
That is like Canadian things. It's a Canadian thing. Yeah, like a super common thing Yeah, one hundred ten either boys. Yeah, you're just saying I've been watching some letter Kenny.
I'm getting up on the lingo I don't like it's a Texas size 10 for their bud. I don't understand Okay, what's the TV show you've been watching? Letter Kenny. What is that?
Uh, it's it's a show about a small rural Canadian town There's a small town in Ontario called Letter Kenny and the show is about a fictionalized version of that small rural farm town Is that a show happening right now? Or is this? Just released up so season 10? Wow, season 10.
It started as a YouTube show Like it started as like a sketch comedy bit on YouTube and if you were like, I want this So now it became a 10 season show. Geez Louise. Like it's 10 seasons. Maybe it was only like four and I'm just exaggerating I'll look it up.
Okay, that's gonna hard-hitting questions. Okay, so I'm here with I feel like I shouldn't say it because I want people to listen to this episode but I'm coming with somewhat of a Matthew topic Or it sounds like a Matthew topic and we'll end up being more of a English and philosophical and I guess historical discussion But I'm here to talk about causation. That's the topic going into for today, which hearing me say causation Probably makes you think this is not a particularly classical concept and when I say the word causation Is there anything that like springs to mind immediately? Isn't wasn't how things what causes things like one of Plato's Fundamental question or isn't causation a fundamental question of antiquity something like that Graham Graham and Adrian will have periodic flashback during the first 15 minutes of this conversation because we Sorry, is that what's happening?
Yes, so we recorded the first 15. Well, we didn't record it We started we talked for 15 minutes thinking we were recording and we were not so what Graham is remembering is the next thing that I'm going to Do I just hear things and then I like kind of follow them away and then everything pop up I'm like pretty sure One drink through forests picking leaves from trees I present everything in my mind. I'm incredible. Wow.
How did you know the next thing I was going to talk about other than it being the second time you've heard it? We're just on the same way of life. I read the same thing No, you've heard the same thing read. Yeah, nailed it.
This is yeah, listen to a podcast. Yeah, it's great. It's a really short one That was only about 15 minutes. Yeah, I never got to the punch Exactly right Works for me We're gonna be punchy this episode this is our first one back after like a month and a half So which is a lot listener and listener what we're referring to is one of the one of our favorites one of our favorite reviews that we got recently That said was it the lack of depth and scholarship may not appeal to everyone but it works for me Thank you all for listening to this we deserve zero listeners.
Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome that guy We're glad to work for you. Yeah, but if you walk and go and leave five-star reviews that would be kind of a nice new year's gift for us And not leave decent reviews that are like weirdly backhanded I saw on Twitter sometime ago like the reviews that cut are the three or four stars because the one star It's like okay. You just don't like us.
That's fine. They're three or four star like they get you and they don't like you I mean that's it's not that like I've just rejected you off the bat It's like I spent some time with your podcast and I still don't and I sort of enjoy it Yeah, but it could be better. Yeah, they're here. You're exact.
You are insufficient. Yeah, they're the one your podcast We'll check it out. I believe a fighting three or four star review for your podcast, too Oh, man I wish we can reply and leave counter reviews of just the people leaving the reviews wouldn't that be anything? No, it'd be terrible I feel like it'd be a good choice.
Oh, you'd be doing is like sniping people all day, right? Swatted. That's what's gonna happen. Oh, yeah I don't like this plan at all.
Okay, so speaking of four-star reviews Virgil is the one who said the thing that Graham is trying to remember one of his flato image row up and seriously lack of scholarship So This is gonna be bad. Okay, so the Virgil's quote which I will not read in Latin because I don't speak Latin because I like scholarship Is happiest the man who has been able to know the causes of things? I think this is an episode that only the three of us will laugh at everyone listening is gonna be like what is going on? Yeah, exactly.
Happy the man who has been able to know the causes of things. So that's again is a classical concept There's at least some discussion about causation in the history of philosophy. We will hit a point where causation is like the big question How do we know what causes things and we'll talk about that later? I promise it's a big question that we may want to actually get to it But there's a there's a specific phrase I'm hoping to get from you all when you hear the word causation Is there like there's like the phrase that comes to mind when people talk about causation?
First cause? Oh, see you actually like it First cause is a great one and that's like Aristotle talking about why does anything exist? It has to be a first cause. Maybe if I say the word correlation causation, is there a phrase?
That's the thing that's the correlation is not causation is the fallacy that's sort of it's sort of a post-talk ergo proctor Logical fallacy that you know just because two things are correlated doesn't mean that they cost each other Yes, that one specifically about temporal causation Just because one thing happened before another doesn't mean that cause like I walked a black cat walked in from a bathroom A girlfriend broke up with me must have been cat like that's I'm wondering if you can say more about it because when you talk about that is a logical fallacy It's a thing you talk about in the context of logic Like what you need to be able to prove you need to be able to have more proof that the black cat like Texted your girlfriend like told her about all the other stuff you've been doing. That's why she dumped you Like what is allowable proof then if not the temporal relationship should matter if every time before I trip I see a black cat You know I would at least ask a question of is there some relationship here But you're saying logically I shouldn't do it like a pool of data like yet a bell curve of black cat involved interactions and then breakups But imagine it's not even it's not a bell curve. It's like literally one like it's a hundred percent It's a hundred percent of the time I see the black cat I get broken up with Like what a life. Yeah, what a life to live you know you're walking to go on a date like you see a black cat Not again.
Sorry. It's just not gonna work out But like logically you'd say that isn't a relationship or that's not something I can point to is evidence correct I guess I'm asking you you cannot you cannot draw the conclusion only based on their temporal nearness That's the point but it but temporal nearness can be allowed can be an indicator of causation The thing about causation is that it's really hard to prove right? Yes, I've seen a lot of people claim that one of the main causes of World War two is this right before this happened World War like I don't know they invented computers and world war two or something It can't be that hard to prove every time I go on the internet It says the Dow Jones is down point five percent because of inflation fears They know why the market is down and this is an exact example of that kind of thing right and so if you're going to prove causation I think in my experience your best bet is is high probability of causation, right? I can show that okay in the past market fears around inflation have driven the Dow down right every time there's inflation fears Dow goes down is it possible the Dow is down because of moon faces and people act weird at certain moon faces then yeah Yeah, maybe I got some intern that has to like right in our clear day I'm trying to find there's like a famous cartoon I think it's a New Yorker cartoon on Wall Street today news of lower interest rates in the stock market up But then the expectation of those that those rates would be inflationary since the market down until the realization that lower rates might stimulate the sluggish economy Push the market up before it ultimately went down on fears that an overheated economy would lead to a reimposition of higher interest rates That's just a loop on a loop on a loop of causation, which yes exactly So I think that's like that's that is 90% of like financial commentary is that we'll come back to the correlation causation You know correlation does not equal causation comment, but I think that's helpful I think at least to start with of you know I'm only I'm here into this program on data science a decent chunk of it is like how do we know anything?
Because if you start from a place of every time you see a correlation You have to have the immediate comment of correlation doesn't imply causation. You kind of can't learn anything Yeah, I think implies is a fine word. Yes correlation does imply causation It does not prove causation. I think that's a I think that's a helpful and necessary thing We'll go through an example of a guy who very who took this hard line of correlation not being related to causation and do his do his detriment So just as the background the the Greek word for cause comes from science and law So again in the case of science and law you're looking for this kind of one-to-one relationship of in science Why does this one outcome occur?
Why do these two chemicals when combined lead to this other thing and again? That's one where a correlation you can pretty clearly say it's a causation You put these two chemicals next to each other there's a reaction It causes some kind of outcome to come from that if you get carbon and oxygen you get carbon dioxide, right? Or in law what you're looking for is not merely what events happened But why did those events happen? It's not enough to say that you know, your neighbor's sheep was stolen But why was that sheep stolen and so that this in the context of law you get into these different meanings of the word cause And this might be something you all have heard of before that cause can be split into four different types of cause Oh, sorry, it's just like formal cause efficient cause Yes, yeah, it is actually you did an episode on this Graham.
I don't remember it. There's a long time ago. You remember this So we can talk about that in a second But in thinking about cause and the legal setting you start to see there's some ambiguity into what we mean by cause So again in the sense of you know, what caused my neighbor's sheep to be stolen? Well, someone picks it up and moved it Okay Well the day before my neighbor had insulted my child, right like that could be a cause that then led to someone stealing the sheep And then you go from there so you get this kind of small sounds man I mean, apparently your Canadian show will tell you all about these small sounds like Still cheap, which is a stolen sheep.
That's sounds like every day So yes, we get start to see this kind of ambiguity and what we mean by the word cause I'll come back part of this topic is there's a math angle to it when I hear causation I think of like statistics, but like 3,000 years ago that didn't really exist And then the other side of it is that in talking about Herodotus Herodotus is trying to track the cause of the Greco Persian wars That he's living during and so to get to his answer of like why are the Greeks fighting the Persians? He goes back to here's all of Greek history and here's all of Persian history And then this is why conflict has happened that's has led us to this moment And I think part of a question to ask in that is whether he's actually able to answer the question he sets out to prove Like what does it mean for the series of events? We've talked about so far to cause the Greco Persian wars I guess maybe I can pose it that way like AJ you just referenced World War one Like this is the cause of World War one. What do people mean by that when they say this caused World War one?
The black hand shot the urge Duke. Yeah, so in some like and let's say more so because that happened that's all you got to put some in the textbook Point to one event and say this calls world war one. What does that mean to say that that event caused World War one? I mean, it's so it's either a simplification over simplification to tell a story Yes, and this is kind of what we were even getting at when we were doing our Herodotus episodes I'm talking about like what is history who?
because What caused World War one would be every single event that is that has been happening in the years in all the different countries and all the Different people leading up to it some more heavily way than others like leaders more heavily weighted than peasants But still the lives of peasants in rural Germany also had an effect on you know, so to say that you yeah, you can't really Gather enough data to be able to say it But then in the ancient world you have people be like well my cousin heard that this guy had a dream and that's what caused the Persian War So done history over that. This reminds me of a you guys ever read Simon's of Titan like I want to get It's about a guy who becomes a pariah and the enemy of the world So they basically banish him and he goes up to the moon of Titan and he meets the salient who apparently crash landed there He's got a busted spaceship and he lives to be you know forever old again And apparently all of human history has been orchestrated by this alien in order that we would set up buildings in a certain way that would spell out Help I'm stranded for this alien living on this moon And he's been like, you know manipulating all of you in history until this time And so that would be the cause right but it's just a show that like whatever we think is the cause is probably one of a myriad And there's interconnectedness all of it I like that example because in if you were to ask the people building that I've read the story So tell me if this is totally wrong But if you ask the people why they're building those buildings they'd say I want to house or I want to go to store But if you were to read the story like to know the meta thing going on you'd say it's these aliens that have like planted this desire in them Right. So Herodotus doesn't do this But Thucydides who's the like the next guy who writes like a big history Thucydides differentiates between these two different types of causes and in his history He's thinking through both what the immediate cause of it some event is and what the real cause of some event is and his distinction is that the immediate cause Is you know if we're thinking World War one, it's well. Yeah, if you think World War one It would be the assassination of Archdude of France Ferdinand Triggered all of these treaties.
Yeah, right? So the immediate cause the thing that immediately preceded all these countries kind of pulling into their separate camps was the Assassination but you could just as easily say that what caused it are the treaties being signed in the first place Right. Well, that's not as neat of an answer because actually it stretches over 200 years or whatever of countries signing treaties with one another and Allying themselves in certain ways that were there to be a conflict over the cause of those treaty Like you sort of have to follow this chain backwards right and the desire to go to war as opposed to Not right like there must have been enough conflict That's outside of just that moment of assassination that countries wanted to fight or felt the compelled to fight those become more cultural questions Then of you know honor was attacked or the only way to address these things is war not diplomacy any number of those things And that's not you can't point to that and say, you know Victorian culture did this right? It's a broader Moment it's a broader thing happening than just someone shot someone else.
You really So this is one way to get at these different forms of causes especially in the context of history There are immediate causes and there are real causes is what the city's calls them, but immediate versus present conditions or something like that But different types of causes I might but I'm just thinking when we go back to Herodotus or even or Thucydides when they tell the story you have, you know there's this guy and he The king killed his son and he was working for the king and then someone else came to him and said Hey, you can work with me towards the king and that started the war That's like a very ancient way of talking about how a war started whereas we as modern people we have scholars that are like Alright, I've spent seven years analyzing the history of bread prices in ancient Persia But that doesn't necessarily mean that this is enough We need to gather more data to be able to tell us why the Persian war started and the ancient guy said well It's because that guy was insulted by this guy and he killed his kid. Yes The ancient world it just doesn't care about data as much as we as modern people do that might be true I would say again Thucydides is separating between these two different types of causes in his History the Peloponnesian He'll talk about the same distinction and say that the immediate cause of one of the conflicts he's writing about is the breaking of a treaty So in the same way of similar to World War one But the real cause is this kind of bubbling conflict that then gets its moment to be expressed in the breaking of a treaty So there's still there's still that separation between the two of them I think what you're saying is that When Herodotus is telling history, it's people doing things. It's not giant social forces But when in the ancient world when they're telling history, they're also having a Trying to like weave in a teaching or thinking about the ideal type to it Don't be the kind of king that murders your subjects kids or else they'll come back and attack you Whereas when somebody is writing about the seven-year fluctuation of the history of bread prices and its causes and how that sort of caused the Peloponnesian war Whatever, they don't have a moral teaching element to it. They're trying to give you quote-unquote objective They might say that they are proposing certain policies for price controls or something like that And which would lead to a more kind of technocratic view of these things as opposed to Herodotus is very much a moral view of conflict comes from failure of its leaders or immoral opponents who are just instigating conflict and so maybe that's part of the difference So our statistician statistician's technocrats is up here I mean if you get to a point where it's you know, this one factor increases life.
Yeah, yeah that Do you feel that siren call their methods? No, I'm not going into like public health or something like that But like there's a there's like a strain of it that would say we should do everything we can to force people to live longer Be healthier or you know people can be informed about information and make their choices from there Like this is this is maybe in plugging future episodes This is kind of the ethic behind a book that both Hanneberg and I've been reading over Christmas, which is the foundation trilogy They it's very much alike dream about what happens if like staticians get to rule the universe And they can predict everything and then wouldn't it be better if like all the smarts rule us. It's very much like a post-war You know, he's actually a mirror. I guess part of me thought he was critical of that anyway We'll talk about the episode.
I'm not actually ready. Yeah, is that the episode you're prepping? Are we gonna do a episode? Oh, I want you to finish foundation first before we do.
Are we're gonna do the trilogy? Should I finish the trilogy before we do it? I'm not sure what the mule I should read it. We should just each one.
Oh It's a quick easy read. You should do it. Okay, so Graham's last question I think is really important of Herodotus paints things really easily of this led to this led to this led to war and I think what is really fascinating about the book I'm only three books in out of I think nine and the books build on each other So both of you have recurring characters so creases comes back in book three which we'll talk about sometime in the future But also these are bloodlines and so you're seeing the sons of sons of sons primarily there are women in it too But it is primarily the story of men. I think that was during our AMA Yeah, this is mostly about men But you also get to see this kind of cyclical pattern to history that there's something about the father that is mirrored in the son and then corrected in the grandson or something like that So that's one way of telling history But you know that he's oversimplifying and based on footnotes, you know, he's wrong about a lot of things So that's frustrating, right?
It's not there was a dream about a giant donkey Yeah, sure The one we laughed about That one of the daughter being over Pippie kid being over all of Europe I think like that might have actually happened but also someone actually had to conquer Europe and it wasn't the dream that did it And then but there is something correct to like when your populace feels pressured by prices They rise up or whatever, right? Or if there's a plague that's going to impact your My attention to episode forever ago where you talked about the black death like the black death prevented war from happening in Europe Because people died so many people died and that's a true thing also So I think I think Thucydides says this and I think it's correct here Both of them are right that Herodotus can oversimplify and say that certain kings did something and that caused something And I think the story can be right also I think the question of what causes something would be best answered by if that thing didn't happen would the outcome still occur Right, so if you remove if you remove the assassination of um Fransford and end would world war ones still happen and that's a this sort of speculative history Yeah, uh, you can call it that in the fancy stats languages calling it potential outcomes That when you do a study what you want to know is Let's like the question we'll talk about smoking a little bit And so to answer the question of does smoking cause cancer What you want to do is give grandma pack a cigarette to smoke every day for 20 years And then go back in time and do it again where you don't smoke for 20 years And then at the end of that we look and say it's grandma cancer and smoking one and not in the other where does he have cancer in both or something like that Do you notice a problem with that? We haven't the time to change it That's one way people get around it, but twins still don't have the same Sorry, my twin eats eggs for breakfast every day and I don't so you either have differences between the twins or something unique to twins themselves Like is there something weird about these I go to these I go that splits into two and then creates two children and the answer is maybe um The we've talked about it before twin studies are a way to get around a lot of these things But even in my smoking example You can't assign smoking to one person and not to another right it'd be unethical to say smoke for 20 years if you think it's gonna cause cancer And you can't just look at who smokes and who doesn't because there might be some predisposing factor That both lead you to smoke and also to cancer. So then is a historian somebody that either explicitly or implicitly ascribes to some sort of philosophy about causation?
I don't think you have to say that because the historian would say they're being objective and they probably have to focus on something And so but if you're sitting down, you're gonna write a book on a period of history You're gonna say okay. What are the things that I'm gonna focus on? What are the things that I think are important? And what you're saying is what do I think is the is the top of the list for being more important in terms of causality, right?
Yeah, either the great people or kind of like broad social things I agree with that but in your I just listened to some of your Plantagenate episodes Which is why I keep bringing it up But like did your Plantagenate guy are you saying he over focused on like the Plantagenate? Well, even when I did it, I read a bunch of different sources So I read Brown I think it's a lot of the guys last name and then I read the Churchill's history of English speaking people And so you know I read a couple of different things Um, so but I was very definitely like Taking a narrative story person approach to it very much so I do yes I think different historians take different approaches to it and they will run from It's entirely ideology to its entirely data And that's what I tried to get at many episodes ago of the difference between History of private life and Montalou Montalou is 400 pages about a seven-year period in like rural in this one town Montalou in rural France And it ends up being this really fascinating story about these connections between all these family members But there's not really much to apply outside of that one city That's the problem with it is you can't you've not really learned anything about a town 10 miles over Because you've only learned about this one town Which may which might have similarities but also might be totally idiosyncratic Compare that to um History of private life. They're analyzing all of human history over the course of five volumes But all of human history as communists It wasn't it was critical theory But they have like a single like that book can then be used to understand any point in human history because it's primarily A viewpoint as opposed to looking at data. Yeah, does that make sense?
I'm sorry. I'm knocking you off I'm causing you to uh, you know, yeah without Graham. This wouldn't happen. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very fishy Rabbit trail Hey, let's talk about that rabbit trail. The show is what we are.
So I'm okay with that So again, but this all gets at the same thing of in history What are we doing? Herodis thinks he's tracking a series of causal events And he thinks what causes each thing is the act of a king in most cases or like the like the elite of the elite There are times when common people come into the story. It's not very Um comments not very regular for that to happen Okay, so we've talked through some of these kind of distinctions there And we're still kind of looking at like this old view I'm trying to get an ancient view of what causes something else That does bring us to Aristotle, which we've covered before Do you all remember what these four causes are what it is for? Yeah, how Aristotle codifies cause I mean, there's the final cause the efficient cause the formal cause and uh Santa Santa Claus.
Yeah, I didn't say material. I mean, I didn't say material That's a formal a formal and material different formal and material are different. Okay. Okay, so what The easiest way to get at it is I think what do I have here?
Yes, and if you're designing a table and you're and you look, you know We're the if you're watching on YouTube You see us the three of us are sitting at a table as we conduct this discussion And if we were to look at each other and say what caused this table How would you answer what caused this table? Somebody wanted some trees. Okay, so uh, you're saying like the wood itself had to be like made at some point And that's there's a material to this table That's the material cause of why is there a table is wood that like we need wood for there to be a table On the carpenter you need someone to make that table So that's the efficient cause that's the one who's doing something The primary source of the change for this final product. That's the efficient cause.
So there has to be a carpenter What else does that carpenter need? A idea of table this so like some kind of design to say like, you know I want a square table or a circle table or what shape would you call this oblong? What is this? Oh, an ovular table.
There must be some design to it. Boat shaped boat? Yeah, what boat is oh, I guess I'm thinking of boats top and down, but you're thinking of it. Okay, so I use that analogy with my kids.
I say we're all sitting We're all sitting in a little boat and we're all going the same direction and I know where we're going But I need you all the row. I like that. So that would be a formal cause. So there what is the form that you're trying to attain to in this case It'd be the table that looks like an oval and then there's a final one of like why why does this table exist?
We needed a table for a classroom. So we hired a carpenter to take trees and make it Yeah, so the thing you're going to use it for eventually. That's the the final cause of table So us sitting around talking or learning from students or if you eat food at your dining room table dining would be your final cause So then that's what's holding up our YouTube camera It's holding up our YouTube camera sitting on top of what I think your fuzzy waters I think it's supposed to be a selfie stick is what that actually is. Oh, really?
Yeah, it comes it breaks into a tripod at the bottom also, but It's left over from your influencing camera influencer days. Yeah, I have all the three pictures on instagram So clearly it was a short lived time in my life. Okay, so you haven't accepted me. Have you added me?
I think so. I think it was like five years ago. I added you to embarrassing. I follow you on Twitter.
Does that count? Do you really? Oh gosh. Okay, I tweet about like I need to like I tweet about like class education on the stock market Which is probably really frustrating for people because they're either following me for one or the other reason I'd probably just have two different Twits.
I I know you're yeah, I don't like that at all. Um, I know you're quite an influencer I'm not sure you're quite a point of having two different Twitter accounts. Let's get that. Okay.
Thank you. Okay, so that gets us to Now move and past it. Thank you very much. Move past it.
Move past it. So where are we right now? We've looked at how there's a virtualized this conception that causes an important thing to understand And then we look at how does an idea of cause develop it moves through science and moves through medicine It moves through law and then the ambiguity requires a type of structure which then aerosol provides with these four different causes Okay, do these four causes help us in looking at history So is there a way that we can take a material formal efficient and final cause and understand what Herodotus is talking about in his histories Final cause is always going to be the more controversial one. Why these people are doing what I mean And this is sort of even comes up when we're when we're at a school when we're choosing a history textbook Sometimes you'll get these history textbooks that are a little too like God's sovereign hand of dominion over history is and they're explaining like world war one happened because god wanted america to become the world power You're like, uh, no, but that's probably not the final cause where we really want to be or we don't know or we don't know Yeah, so um anyway I think but the final cause can there can be multiple final causes that so when we're we'll talk about uh, Can buy sis in whenever I do a future whenever I do my next or up this episode with the son of syrus So like, you know, syrus wanted to invade egypt.
Well, that's you know, he Invading egypt is his final cause you know, like or i'm sorry final cause would be rather He wanted to grow as empire as big as possible But we know that and there are things that happen later because he invades egypt, but I don't think those work his intention in doing it Right. It's kind of he as a person takes action and then makes his next decision of what he wants to do next Um, yeah, I think we I think we get final causes as to why people are doing things I think we get a lot of efficient causes At least in as much as we're talking about a narrative approach to history the person doing the action matters a lot That would be the efficient cause the person doing something Um, and I'm not so I don't think that like material and formal matter quite so much What about the human nature element? So if you think about like the logic you want to call it a logic of violence so someone does something and Kills a citizen of your nation and you are going to come back and Go big you're gonna go bigger than you know, if someone if someone shoots the archduke for an and Um, you're not just gonna go and do like for like like like you need to assert You don't want this to ever happen again So to do it you try to set up a deterrent by going bigger But if you go bigger than all of us then you sort of got this escalation of of reciprocity and so what would that like human nature the logic of if you want For people to describe as a logical violence, where would that fit in regards to cause it causes of war or causes of conflict? Is that a material cause or thing that because the act the people doing War in that case are humans they are the material of war in a weird way.
They're just feels weird to say it that way Yeah, I'm trying to think of where else it would fit other than it being Just the efficient When you're talking about the people like the just depends on which person you're talking about if you're talking about the foot soldier in combat They're not the one choosing to go to war in most cases So in that case it's still who's the ruler that's there that ruler is the efficient cause in most cases And then the people fighting our material for the war really when you get down to it, which is the bummer I don't think that answers your question quite though Is that yeah, I'm just I think I'm still forming it. Okay Maybe to say differently, I'm sure you can find ways to fit in a material and a formal cause so your formal cause like How would you make it your formal cause you think war is the way People should live therefore you pursue war every spring or summer or whatever in that sense going to war at certain Periods of time would be the form right instead the form of life should be war Could also be the type of warfare like the formal cause could be well We are we all live near the sea so it's gonna be naval battles as opposed to anything else And then there's some valleys so we do certain things with cannons like that That might be the formal cause of the warfare is the surroundings dictate what kind of warfare it's gonna be and same on that It could be that like you if you have agreements with other nations about like how do we treat each other in war So, you know, we we fight this war until the last person is dead I think that would be a formal cause like we there are certain agreements you've made You know, implicitly or explicitly about what war should look like that would be the form of war So maybe you can get all four of these in there. Maybe maybe more specifically I'm saying harada just seems to focus more on the efficient cause he's focused a lot more on who are these people making these choices that do these things And someone on the final cause he tries to get into motivation sometimes, but seems mostly focused on like are they good people or not? Is that I don't I don't have anything formulated on this.
I wonder if there's something about a difference between those two different approaches to history I don't because I don't think I would say that History of private life is focused on formal and material causes. Maybe they are Probably more focused on a formal cause that the forum essentially is the embedded social structure that everyone lives in and like that becomes kind of front and center Much more so than people don't they have the formal cause that like all human interactions are based on class conflict And so I think that gets superimposed over everything and so that's the formal cause. Yeah, like that's the literally the design the form of all life Maybe there's something there Yeah, I didn't plan on anything there, but again, I would say harada is as much more focused on the efficient Causes the actors themselves and then final causes which would be like what are the things they're trying to accomplish? Okay, I wanted to get to I have a bunch of other stuff in here Francis Bacon and Spinoza and David Hume have thoughts on different kinds of What can we know about causation what can't we know about causation bacon has a great thing about how There are certain places where we should look for certain kinds of causes So in the sciences you can find formal and material causes, but you can't find final causes You can't find meaning from chemical equations that doesn't make sense to look for that there But you could look to history or English or philosophy for kind of those more those deeper philosophical questions Yeah, yeah, I just throw that out as one thought but we don't talk about science that way anymore Even just today I was listening to we were driving and they had the radio show from the top Which is an NPR show where they interview kids who are really good musicians and they do these little interviews and they're talking about one kid Really likes astronomy and space and the interviewer was talking about like When you study the universe it really puts things into perspective about your own life and your own meaning He just sort of set this off the top of his head and the 16-year-old was like, yeah, I guess so and um And that just struck me.
I was like we talk about science as having an implicit for final cause to it Yeah, do we talk about but um but it doesn't necessarily make any sense just because the universe is big It doesn't give us any sort of moral sense But this person was assuming that it does and you hear this a lot from like especially it's sort of the pop science of astronomy It's all say into this and so does that and what that other guy is it Neil? He's near the grass ice and they talk about like human person when you think of the universe we need to take care of our little blue planet Okay, I I've not read this book I've just heard the second hand I think it's in his 2017 astrophysics for people in a hurry He has a like introduction where he talks about how philosophy is useless and it's a waste of time and no one should like bother with that They should only focus on science and then spend 300 pages on philosophy. Yeah, like what philosophy is a work of philosophy That's not that's not science right. Um, and this kind of again the sense of what bacon is talking about of you just can't go beyond Material and formal causes because that's all that again chemical equations or things that are happening in the sky or like pick your thing I guess my point is that there's a smuggled in philosophy into talking about science that I think a lot of people don't realize Yes, and that's exactly what he's saying.
I'm a man of science Then here's 300 pages of my philosophy talking about what science means. Yes, exactly So maybe that's where Aristotle is helpful to is flitting out what we can know and can't know based on a discussion and probably also You know in the same way that when Herodotus gets something wrong about He never gets it. He got lots of things wrong and you all you all didn't think he did but I did uh when we talked about Waterforce water forces right where he talks about a stuff in Egypt And he talks about like the Herodotus machine about how they built the pyramids like it's pretty bad that he I thought that was bad. I think you all didn't think it was bad Was it like sticks and something else?
He just said it was sticks. That's all he says. He doesn't say how it's built or anything So it sounds like he just sounds like that guy. You know in middle school who was like, yeah, I'm not the president Yeah But like you also wouldn't really know because he went to Egypt so he might have actually learned so it's like Like I had a friend that used to eat paper on the bus like whole sheets of paper I don't know why are you doing that.
He's like it's made of trees. It helps me breathe better And I was like it doesn't make any sense. I'm not old enough to refute you Doesn't sound right, but you better give me one of those sheets of paper You want to go and head your back. Yeah, actually I think so.
Yeah, he was very convincing. He was so confident You don't see that uh, I don't know if he was the right word, but it was a picture of a Okay, and the story is like, you know, he told all of his classmates that his uncle was superman And you'll see this and then it turns out that his uncle is whoever played superman in the movies So he brings his uncle along through everyone. Yeah, so it's kind of that thing of like maybe Herodotus is right and he knows what he's talking about Could have been sticks or we're talking like Dean Kane superman. Are we talking?
No, he's the newest one Cavill? Yeah, Henry Cavill. Yeah, anyway, so I think that's a helpful thing to like limit What kind of the point I'm trying to make about Herodotus is that he can be wrong about like material things or formal things of like the form of Pyramid making machine, but he still has a lot of really good things to say about efficient and final causes I think that still makes him worthwhile. That was the only that was the thought I had in going through all of this is I think you can look at an ancient work that is wrong or uninformed Uninformed is the wrong word, but not modern in its awareness of like science and still get lots of useful things because Just because you've moved on in your knowledge of material and formal causes doesn't mean you've moved on in your knowledge of efficient and final causes That makes sense.
Yeah, that so I think those are like different domains of knowledge and Herodotus is still useful in the ones that he's writing about Thank you. I'm not wasting your life Okay, so the final thing to go into is we talked about it a little before that When I hear the word causation or correlation the first thing I think of is that phrase that causation does not imply correlation We've already kind of clarified what that means in that it's kind of it's meant as a formal statement that You can't only prove causation from correlation Which is a fine statement to make even if you google spurious correlations There's a website that will auto-generate different correlations and one of them is like a like Nick age movies versus Drownings and pools or something like that one of my favorites is age of miss america pageant winners and murders by steam hot objects and Vipers yep like actually look really compelling per capita consumption of cheese and Yeah, or like you know dying by being strangled in your bedsheets. Oh, yeah, that's right More cheesy the more people are dying in their beds. Yeah, so yeah, that's just for awareness.
I can't use that spread awareness Ashton spread awareness not Go please. What do you say a per capita cheese consumption the number of people who died by becoming entangled? It's like literally if you just google it you'll find it. It's like one to one it like literally It's silent killer guys.
Is that what it is? And obviously these are like goofy correlations That's the whole point of it is to say just because two things are correlated doesn't mean that they're related to it Repetitive and consistent correlation shows a high probability of causation, right? And that's uh, so there's a somewhat famous story around Uh, the discovery that smoking leads to cancer. That's why I made reference to it earlier because we're talking about it now So this was this has not been a foregone conclusion for ever or even for a very long time It's only in the last 70 years at this point that that's really been accepted widely and some of the There started to be kind of an upswell of studies pointing to concerns around this connection between cancer and smoking It kind of builds in the 40s.
Um, the 50s we get some of the like major studies about it But there's a big pushback from um, got named fissure and fissure is one of the like main statisticians. Um, I think he's the guy who came up with the Analysis of variance test is you know, but I think he's a nova Yeah, um, what it is doesn't matter But like the one of the main statistical tests to determine differences between different groups Um, it's called a difference of means tests. None of this matters But like he is the guy who comes up comes up with the math to determine whether results are significant or not Maybe that's the way to say it and he is someone who is not convinced by uh studies related to Um, smoking and the relationship with cancer, but they've got the little black label on them They do now, but that had to come from somewhere, right? Okay, so if you all wanted to prove this well, I assume you are on board for this relationship But if you wanted to prove this connection between smoking and cancer, how would you decide about to do that?
Try to find as many people who had lung cancer and see how many of them have been smokers And compare that to how many people with lung cancer who don't smoke correct? You'd be able to say, you know, your percentage of people is higher in this one than the other one Yeah, I'd say sample size of of people from random locations in different places, different cultures That sort of thing that smoke both smoked and didn't smoke and then compare the rates of lung cancer in both groups Okay, so I would also do that thing that you do in seventh grade We have two jars you filled them with cotton balls and you have one of the jars smoke a bunch of cigarettes So in the cotton ball that cotton ball jar is all black and gross The other one is all pure and white and then you can scare your classmates and I'm not smoking I like your style is that thing that you didn't seventh grade? Yeah, did you guys do the science experiment with a cigarette? Yeah, yeah, you actually and then like you pump the smoke into the jar And then eventually the cotton balls become all like brown and nasty and black and gross And you can say this is what's happening to your lungs.
That's disgusting No, I've never seen that that seems terrifying for a seventh grade I watch the out a lot where the guy cracked the neck into a pan was like this is your brain on drugs Yeah, we had a guy come to school and he had his like larynx removed He had to talk with a little like reporter next to his and um afterwards we saw him outside new smoking Is that true? Yeah, that's a sad part. Yeah, so just you since you kind of gave different answers I'll just to go through other than um because age is a development on grams. So Age is better than Graham as well.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough with that answer So what Graham proposed is you get a bunch of people who already smoked though. I just matter now Let me give you let me make you wrong. That's even wrong. So so you basically you just do an observation You you say who smokes and who doesn't smoke and then you say who has cancer and who doesn't have cancer Your problem with that is that you will you might have different um correlations under that So let's say that people who smoked in to be older and people who smoked in to be male.
Let's just say yeah, and maybe like half of them eat tar It's fun. Yeah, exactly. So but but even take a lot of cars Well, even let's say that let's say it's a bunch of automotive mechanics who smoke and a bunch of not automotive mechanics You don't well that would there's a bias at that point where you're not comparing apples to apples you're comparing apples to Ranging things. I don't know that like you Again to go back before what we want to have to prove whether something causes something is if you removed it Would the thing not have happened in the with the thing not have happened eventually?
So in our world war one example if you remove the assassination of the archduke is there no world war one In this case if we remove Graham from your next 20 years if we remove smoking grandits and smoke just to say that It's not a fight if fair, but you don't smoke every day. You don't smoke a pack a day Which was my example from before that. I know it. I don't think I just want to pipe in a year Respiratory things.
Yeah, that's fair. Maybe like kill all the covid. I don't like uh like stub in um In a moe dick. Yep, he's supposed to is not receive the bad air.
It preserves him That's why uh, I can't remember the guy it's whoever the previous CEO of southwest was um He gave me a talk at UT and he talked about how he like he had to smoke He said this this might have been just the addiction talking But he said that he had to smoke to keep his um His like veins open. I forget the details. I'm not a scientist Oh, the nicotine opens it up in just like yeah, or like I forgot to cut the blood flowing or if it was the oxygen to get flowing But it was something like he needed that like hot smoking him to do that Which still sounds made up to me now that I say it out loud, but here we go to a sauna Anyway, you could do that drink some coffee. That's also Outlaw all widens blood vessels.
There's I think there's more things than just I feel like him Hitting up the bottle during the day might have gone poorly. Maybe smoking was more uh, socially acceptable I mean you you I don't see any reason why you can't do all three I mean that sounds like that's that's different. That's how hard is it to run an airline? That's exactly right.
Um, so back to how wrong grand is so um, so if you if you get these two different groups You'll have differences between the groups and a critic like RA Fisher who is our statistician of of note right now Can look at that and say those underlying differences could actually be the causes of differences and lung cancer differences and heart attacks differences and whatever your thing is Okay, so what would you do in response to that? Well, you'd find people who are similar to each other and compare them to each other That's what AJ is talking about. Good job. So a job.
Thank you while trying to control for the variables Any large sample size with lots of people from different areas. You're still wrong though. So I'm sorry Not at the wrong disagree. I see your facts and I disagree So don't believe them But so let's say that I do a study and I take 20,000 people and I have them fill out questionnaire and it asks them for their gender and it asks them for their Um, their occupation and how long they've been smoking and all these different things And then I I um and then I compare two different groups that are equal sizes and on average are the same for age weight You know pick all your categories.
What's wrong at that point? What could what could a critic do with that study that's balanced on all these things that you checked for when you did your survey when they got separated? Nothing it's perfect. How could it be otherwise?
It's just science that's your science a critic could look at that and say you haven't measured for everything So sure you've measured four things that we think are important But what if there is a an underlying an underlying genetic marker that both predisposes you for smoking and predisposes you for cancer Which do you all want to or how many people live next to nuclear plants and everyone knows nuclear plants make you want to smoke That's So that's so either you can take it you can take it away Either way you're saying you haven't matched everything correctly or you haven't matched everything because you haven't measured everything because you can't measure Very how do we ever do nutritional studies saying things like cholesterol or eggs or wine? How can we help? That's why you get those little graphs where it's like number of studies that say tomatoes will give you cancer for number of studies that say tomatoes will cure cancer For like that's why you get those yeah Um, I'll just read this is from this is from RA Fisher. Um, what if the development of acute lung cancer was preceded by an undiagnosed chronic inflammation He wrote and what if this inflammation led to a mild discomfort but no conscious pain if that were the case wrote Fisher Then one would expect the suffering from prediagnosed lung cancer to turn to cigarettes for relief It's like it's so it's not the cigarettes causing the lung cancer.
It's the lung cancer causing We owe big tobacco a massive apology. Yeah, we're doing it wrong. Those guys have been trying to help us out this time Exactly. There's trying to give you a chance.
Uh, this is the money quoted at the end to take the poor chap cigarettes away from him Would be rather like taking away the the stick from a blind man. Oh That subconscious discomfort from his cancer. No, nothing is puff on yes now Puffless, do you have any so he offers this as an explanation? So then what would you what's the response to that?
What do you do? Well, you just disagree with him. Um, you think he's right and then therefore cigarette should be okay Just get a bunch of certain smoking some monkeys. Sorry.
Take take lung tissue from a bunch of people and then just start running smoke through it I mean lung tissue. You know it does not have well, you could okay. I'm huge development. Okay.
Take one guy. Uh-huh Colonial bunch. Yeah, there it is. Makes some smoke.
He doesn't have some not smoke We're just just having smoke on one side of his body One long long long long long just pump. Oh, yeah, there you go. Just pump it one through Well, cuz the left and right lungs might be different like left and right might be different I think we need the cloning. We'll never know.
Um, the star wars good uneasy close it. Those guys do whatever we could do, right? Yeah, we can build what's the name of the planet where they build all the clones. I don't know the name of it Clenopia.
Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, I think this is the way science should go. Um, some screaming at their car radio right now No, we're not going to do this.
Uh, tattoo up and in You're rude Can someone no wait? I was gonna say leave us a one-star of you saying that but I don't want you to leave a one-star of you Yeah, even if I've heard you telling us the answer to that question away with the clones were made What was what was our official's response to so essentially the way it works is a study comes out It's pretty compelling stuff and Fisher will come back with one of these criticisms a new study will come out visual reply And it's like really standing in the way of there being any Development on like limits on tobacco usage because this is the you know, you know, I'm sure everyone is seeing these really videos where it's like Nine out of ten doctors agree that smoking is good for your health or improved circulation or whatever thing it is like And in the meantime people are dying because of that because tobacco is not limited So what is Fisher's response after a couple of these different Studies come out and he rejects them. What's like the ultimate conclusion of all this? I don't know The event of argument knowledge No, he he dies as the answer to it This is uh, this ends up being one of the like biggest stains on his reputation is his resistance to Acceptance of these different studies.
What's the point that I'm making of this? But he's just trying to hold the line for science This is actually a good point in that he's not wanting to move too quickly to say The concern is that you would ban something that again, you're taking the stick away from the blind guy You're hurting people who have lung cancer is what he's arguing, which I understand But what's hard is that to have gotten six or seven high quality studies that point to there being something wrong here and rejecting all of them Essentially boils down to this correlation does not apply causation thing that time after time the researchers are looking at studying Smoking as relates to lung cancer and Fisher doesn't accept any of these as having any information And again, that is ultimately to his detriment I think it's fine to ask whether his process was correct, but his outcomes were just wrong like did other people are struggling Other people jump on well, just because you raised it I know what I'm saying that like if your processes are correct But your outcomes can be wrong then how your process is correct? Oh, but I think every stock trader has trades that go against them It's more like you've referenced the Kyle Vasquot of you by nickels in the hopes of them going to dollars But if you lose 10 cents, it's not a big deal like that's it at some level all This is not the place I thought we'd end it but all decisions are probabilistic And so you're you should take the one anyway gotcha So he was saying like this doesn't give us 100% certainty and everyone's like yeah, but it's pretty compelling stuff And then he took that to say because it's not a hundred percent. It's zero percent.
Yeah, actually it should have been It's not a hundred percent. It's maybe 95% because like it's fine to like question whether this thing is true or not Like that's the purpose of science is to ask do we is what we know true? I think that's a fine question to ask but to hold on to that in spite of all evidence to the contrary Is problematic and then also the kicker Fisher was a smoker It's a really what this comes down to a way that it's often interpreted is that he it was just like a bias of his He couldn't think that he was wrong and doing damage to his own body Therefore, he had to push back on all these studies So the man who is known for his mathematical genius his statistical genius at the end of the day is still a human who just wants to smoke right Just wants to have a dark the end of a busy day. It's a busy day.
Yes, so that's let's see I think that's all that so he's still a super big deal guy He's the reason that we can do statistics today So is that just how his story is written when you're studying statistics is like well He was pretty great, but he was kind of a doofus on the whole smoking thing So he's kind of an embarrassment. Let's move on embarrassment No, he's not a big deal enough person to like get in that kind of public conversation about his legacy or whatever He in the same way that like a scientist will put their name on Like when they discover an animal like it becomes the magby animal like you put your name into it They're just like like the Fisher test like is a thing like putting Fisher's name on things is still a thing and that has not been taken away And again, I don't think he's not a big enough deal to like have his name removed from stuff. He does also have some Yeah, there's other stuff that's like he was born in 1890 There's other stuff that's questionable in his writings and intellectual thought but I don't think anyone really cares about that I'm rambling at this point. Mostly did a lot of good stuff his stuff on smoking was not good, but Wait smoking causes cancer.
So there's nothing there to know so stop smoking your pipe I don't know do whatever you want to do whatever you want to do with that information. Okay. So anyway question The thing we're going into was about causation There are different types of causation that we are able some of them We can study through history some of them we can study through science and that distinction and separation I think it's really helpful the statement that correlation does not apply causation has a certain formal meaning But it does not mean there is no information to be gained from correlation That was the only that was the thing I wanted to make sure to wrap up with and that is it cool Okay, well, this has been classical stuff You should know you can find our website at classical stuff.net you can subscribe to us on patreon if you should and you should do it You if you do that you get all kinds of cool goodies like our monthly AMA and some other some other cool things we send out to our listeners Bonus episodes and at certain tiers you can hear all of our banter between episodes, which is extra fun And then uh, yeah, you can tweet at us at classical clsscal stuff and I think that's it That all the websites and stuff. Oh, you can email us at the guys at classical stuff.net.
That's the last one Okay, well, we're we're happy to be back and make an episode for you guys and we will see you next week. Bye