Re:Deterministic thinking: a problem in how we think, not ju...
by killjoywashere on Friday September 13, 2019 @07:12PM
(#20967619)
Coming from Physics to Medicine this was one of my main frustrations: how could they possibly know the mechanisms so well in advance of the experiment?! These cells are soup! Now that I am in this world, I think the problem is implicitly acknowledged from top to bottom and whats really amazing is how much they, we, really have figured out by persistently, billions of times over, asking dumb, binary questions.
For example, given that event A correlates well with B one is likely to ask:
1) Does A cause B?
2) Does B cause A?
3) Does some unknown cause A and B?
Framing the possibilities in this way neglects interactions in which all possibilities are true to some degree. The author argues that all possibilities being true to some non-zero degree (A causes B and B causes A and an unknown causes both A and B) should be the more common expectation in natural systems. Therefor, framing problems in a way that suggests there are clear exclusions i.e. determinations, leads to cognitive bias and premature conclusions.
*As apposed the the common usage of deterministic in computer science where a process is said to be deterministic if every execution with identical inputs produces the same result.