Colin Meloy Is Dark Matter, At Least for the Time Being
If we could find a chain of well-understood and trusted causal relationships that together forge a connection between cause and effect, military coup and oranges, we would have to accept the relationship as a truly causal one, and not just accidental correlation.
All this is just what Hume more concisely says in the quote above: we unload our uncertainty about causal relations on simpler, more fundamental causal relationships, but this can only stave off our uncertainty for so long. At some point, we have to ask: but how do we know that this elementary interaction causes that one? How do we know that the fundamental cause-effect relationships that we take for granted aren’t accidental? The answer is: we observe correlations!
In his Daily Meh piece that got a lot of attention the other week, Simen argues, with no shortage inscrutable post-Graduate circular logic, that “all we have to help us establish causal relationships is correlation,” or, in so many words, that orange production on one side of the world necessarily impacts the success of military coups on another.
My knee-jerk reaction to this argument was “What? No.” and I tried to argue as much over e-mail, and was, without much hesitation or explanation, told I was wrong in the roughly same terse manner that so many theoretical Computer Science professors had employed to tell me I was wrong in college.
Listen, Simen is a smart dude—I like him so much I even stole his Tumblr theme!—but I see his argument as one dependent on repeatedly observed coincidences and leaps of faith, and a suggestion that just because we can’t prove that a relationship is not causal yet means that we should accept that it is for the time being. Though he has concocted the necessary verbal discrete math to support his argument—or at least otherwise confuse those who would disagree with him—this approach seems wholly unscientific to me, and it seems downright tired, perhaps because this kind of thinking has been continuously proved wrong since at least the 17th century.
I’ll let astrophysicist and generally awesome human being Niel deGrasse Tyson elaborate to that end. In this talk he gave about the role of Intelligent Design in science, Tyson explains that God has historically been and continues to be credited as the cause of pretty much anything that has ever occurred—even by scientists—at least until science comes up with a better explanation. Before Isaac Newton (co-)invented calculus to show why planets move the way they do, it was widely accepted that the elliptical movement of planets was simply God’s will. People didn’t care to give this problem much thought in part because they didn’t know how to approach it, and so they accepted God’s role (quite literally) on good faith. Years later, around the turn of the 19th century, French mathematician Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace used Newton’s work on planetary mechanics and gravitation to show why the universe is far more stable than previously thought. When asked by then emperor Napoleon Bonaparte why his work made no reference to God, Laplace replied, “I did not require him for this explanation.”
“I like to take things all the way to their logical conclusions,” Simen writes, “and unfortunately, the absence of inferences based on correlation would mean that we could never know that one thing caused another.” Yeah, maybe if you’re really impatient.
This way of thinking reminds me of a tangentially-related argument I had with my father, a philosophy and math professor, a month or two ago. He had called to argue that Colin Meloy, lead singer of The Decemberists, was dark matter.
“But Dad,” I said, “to say that Colin Meloy is dark matter is to imply that he emits no observable radiation whatsoever. He has a pulse, he creates heat, therefore he is not dark matter. You are so wrong.”
“But what if we put him on a planet thousands of light years away? We’d have no possible way to detect him. We can’t even detect radiation emitted by entire planets like that, let alone a single dude on one of them—we have to observe their gravitational effect on nearby stars and infer their existence.”
In some sense, I must begrudgingly agree that my dad is correct: Neither you nor I currently have the scientific tools or cognitive ability to conclusively say that Colin Meloy is not dark matter, to say nothing of the slightly twee girls who name their pets after him and buy his records. And similarly, neither you nor I can prove that the Pope shat in the woods if the only thing we have to observe is a steaming pile of feces that smells vaguely like the lunch menu at the Vatican.
But just because we can or cannot currently prove something to be true or false—or causal, or correlated—does not preclude it from being proven otherwise in the future, nor should it require that we take something at face value for the sake of convenience. I will agree with Simen, then, that correlation does indeed imply causation, but only in those instances where there is something else we’d rather be thinking about to distract us.
