Adam Kucharski

So first of all, if there's a correlation between things, it doesn't tell you much generally that's useful for intervention.

You know, if two things are correlated, it doesn't mean that changing that thing is going to have an effect on that thing because there might be something that's influencing both of them, you know.

If you have more ice cream sales, it will lead to more heat stroke cases.

It doesn't mean that changing ice cream sales is going to have that effect.

But it does allow you to make predictions, potentially.

Because if you can identify consistent patterns, you can say, OK, if this thing's going up, I'm going to make a prediction that this thing's going up.

So one thing I found quite striking actually talking to research in different fields is how many fields choose to focus on prediction because it kind of avoids having to deal with this cause and effect problem.

And even in fields like psychology, it was kind of interesting that

There's a lot of focus on predicting things like relationship outcomes.

But actually, for people, you don't want a prediction about your relationship, right?

You want to know, well, how can I do something about it?

You don't just want someone to tell you your relationship's going to go downhill.

So there's almost part of the challenge is people just got stuck on prediction because it's an easier field of work, whereas actually some of those problems will involve intervention.

I think the other thing that really stood out for me is in epidemiology and a lot of other fields,

Rightly, people are very cautious to not get that mixed up.

They don't want to mix up correlations or associations with causation.

But you've kind of got this weird situation where a lot of papers go out of their way to not use causal language and say it's an association, it's just an association, it's just an association, we can't say anything about causality.

And at the end of the paper, they'll say, well, we should think about introducing more of this thing or restricting this thing.

So it's really the whole paper and its purpose is framed around

a causal intervention, but it's extremely careful throughout the paper to not frame it as a causal claim.