Causal inference is hard (or how I learned to stop worrying and...) - Daniel Westreich

[Lajoie22]

to:piotrtheprimates Randomized control trials are not counterfactual, they are prospective studies.

[PiotrThePrimate]

Whether Jim snorting cocaine caused his heart attack cannot be resolved by counterfactual thinking. What hypothetically happens in a hypothetical parallel world is entirely irrelevant to whether the cocaine caused Jim's heart myocardial infarction. We want to know about this world and about the actual Jim. Counterfactual models of causalit an dthe many worlds argument used to justify them is huge philosophical error and it has leaked into other discliplines.