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...

...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.

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.

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...

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