{"id":1518,"date":"2015-05-14T20:19:38","date_gmt":"2015-05-15T03:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mii.ucla.edu\/causality\/?p=1518"},"modified":"2015-05-14T20:19:38","modified_gmt":"2015-05-15T03:19:38","slug":"causation-without-manipulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/05\/14\/causation-without-manipulation\/","title":{"rendered":"Causation without Manipulation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The second part of our latest post “David Freedman, Statistics, and Structural Equation Models”<\/a> (May 6, 2015) has stimulated a lively email discussion among colleagues from several disciplines. In what follows, I will be sharing the highlights of the discussion, together with my own position on the issue of manipulability.<\/p>\n

Many of the discussants noted that manipulability is strongly associated (if not equated) with “comfort of interpretation”. For example, we feel more comfortable interpreting sentences of the type “If we do A, then B would be more likely” compared with sentences of the type “If A were true, then B would be more likely”. Some attribute this association to the fact that empirical researchers (say epidemiologists) are interested exclusively in interventions and preventions, not in hypothetical speculations about possible states of the world. The question was raised as to why we get this sense of comfort. Reference was made to the new book by Tyler VanderWeele, where this question is answered quite eloquently:<\/p>\n

“It is easier to imagine the rest of the universe being just as it is if a patient took pill A rather than pill B than it is trying to imagine what else in the universe would have had to be different if the temperature yesterday had been 30 degrees rather than 40. It may be the case that human actions, seem sufficiently free that we have an easier time imagining only one specific action being different, and nothing else.”<\/em>
\n(T. Vanderweele, “Explanation in causal Inference” p. 453-455)<\/p>\n

This sensation of discomfort with non-manipulable causation stands in contrast to the practice of SEM analysis, in which causes are represented as relations among interacting variables, free of external manipulation. To explain this contrast, I note that we should not overlook the purpose for which SEM was created — the representation of scientific knowledge<\/em>. Even if we agree with the notion that the ultimate purpose of all knowledge is to guide actions and policies, not to engage in hypothetical speculations, the question still remains: How do we encode this knowledge in the mind (or in textbooks) so that it can be accessed, communicated, updated and used to guide actions and policies. By “how” I am concerned with the code, the notation, its
\nsyntax and its format.<\/p>\n

There was a time when empirical scientists could dismiss questions of this sort (i.e., “how do we encode”) as psychological curiosa, residing outside the province of “objective” science. But now that we have entered the enterprise of causal inference, and we express concerns over the comfort and discomfort of interpreting counterfactual utterances, we no longer have the luxury of ignoring those questions; we must ask: how do scientists encode knowledge, because this question holds the key to the distinction between the comfortable and the uncomfortable, the clear versus the ambiguous.<\/p>\n

The reason I prefer the SEM specification of knowledge over a manipulation-restricted specification comes from the realization that SEM matches the format in which humans store scientific knowledge. (Recall, by “SEM” we mean a manipulation-free society of variables, each listening to the others and each responding to what it hears) In support of this realization, I would like to copy below a paragraph from Wikipedia’s entry on Cholesterol, section on “Clinical Significance<\/a>.” (It is about 20 lines long but worth a serious linguistic analysis).<\/p>\n

——————–from Wikipedia, dated 5\/10\/15 —————
\nAccording to the lipid hypothesis , abnormal cholesterol levels ( hyperchol esterolemia ) or, more properly, higher concentrations of LDL particles and lower concentrations of functional HDL particles are strongly associated with cardiovascular disease because these promote atheroma development in arteries ( atherosclerosis ). This disease process leads to myocardial infraction (heart attack), stroke, and peripheral vascular disease . Since higher blood LDL, especially higher LDL particle concentrations and smaller LDL particle size, contribute to this process more than the cholesterol content of the HDL particles, LDL particles are often termed “bad cholesterol” because they have been linked to atheroma formation. On the other hand, high concentrations of functional HDL, which can remove cholesterol from cells and atheroma, offer protection and are sometimes referred to as “good cholesterol”. These balances are mostly genetically determined, but can be changed by body build, medications , food choices, and other factors. [ 54 ] Resistin , a protein secreted by fat tissue, has been shown to increase the production of LDL in human liver cells and also degrades LDL receptors in the liver. As a result, the liver is less able to clear cholesterol from the bloodstream. Resistin accelerates the accumulation of LDL in arteries, increasing the risk of heart disease. Resistin also adversely impacts the effects of statins, the main cholesterol-reducing drug used in the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease.
\n————-end of quote ——————<\/p>\n

My point in quoting this paragraph is to show that, even in “clinical significance” sections, most of the relationships are predicated upon states of variables, as opposed to manipulations of variables. They talk about being “present” or “absent”, being at high concentration or low concentration, smaller particles or larger particles; they talk about variables “enabling,” “disabling,” “promoting,” “leading to,” “contributing to,” etc. Only two of the sentences refer directly to exogenous manipulations, as in “can be changed by body build, medications, food choices…”<\/p>\n

This manipulation-free society of sensors and responders that we call “scientific knowledge” is not oblivious to the world of actions and interventions; it was actually created to (1) guide future actions and (2) learn from interventions.<\/p>\n

(1)<\/strong> The first frontier is well known. Given a fully specified SEM, we can predict the effect of compound interventions, both static and time varying, pre-planned or dynamic. Moreover, given a partially specified SEM (e.g., a DAG) we can often use data to fill in the missing parts and predict the effect of such interventions. These require however that the interventions be specified by “setting” the values of one or several variables. When the action of interest is more complex, say a disjunctive action like: “paint the wall green or blue” or “practice at least 15 minutes a day”, a more elaborate machinery is needed to infer its effects from the atomic actions and counterfactuals that the model encodes (See http:\/\/ftp.cs.ucla.edu\/pub\/stat_ser\/r359.pdf<\/a> and Hernan etal 2011.) Such derivations are nevertheless feasible from SEM without enumerating the effects of all disjunctive actions of the form “do A or B” (which is obviously infeasible).<\/p>\n

(2)<\/strong> The second frontier, learning from interventions, is less developed. We can of course check, using the methods above, whether a given SEM is compatible with the results of experimental studies (Causality, Def.1.3.1). We can also determine the structure of an SEM from a systematic sequence of experimental studies. What we are still lacking though are methods of incremental updating, i.e., given an SEM M and an experimental study that is incompatible with M, modify M so as to match the new study, without violating previous studies, though only their ramifications are encoded in M.<\/p>\n

Going back to the sensation of discomfort that people usually express vis a vis non-manipulable causes, should such discomfort bother users of SEM when confronting non-manipulable causes in their model? More concretely, should the difficulty of imagining “what else in the universe would have had to be different if the temperature yesterday had been 30 degrees rather than 40,” be a reason for misinterpreting a model that contains variables labeled “temperature” (the cause) and “sweating” (the effect)? My answer is: No. At the deductive phase of the analysis, when we have a fully specified model before us, the model tells us precisely what else would be different if the temperature yesterday had been 30 degrees rather than 40.”<\/p>\n

Consider the sentence “Mary would not have gotten pregnant had she been a man”. I believe most of us would agree with the truth of this sentence despite the fact that we may not have a clue what else in the universe would have had to be different had Mary been a man. And if the model is any good, it would imply that regardless of other things being different (e.g. Mary’s education, income, self esteem etc.) she would not have gotten pregnant. Therefore, the phrase “had she been a man” should not be automatically rejected by interventionists as meaningless — it is quite meaningful.<\/p>\n

Now consider the sentence: “If Mary were a man, her salary would be higher.” Here the discomfort is usually higher, presumably because not only we cannot imagine what else in the universe would have had to be different had Mary been a man, but those things (education, self esteem etc.) now make a difference in the outcome (salary). Are we justified now in declaring discomfort? Not when we are reading our model. Given a fully specified SEM, in which gender, education, income, and self esteem are bonified variables, one can compute precisely how those factors should be affected by a gender change. Complaints about “how do we know” are legitimate at the model construction phase, but not when we assume having a fully specified model before us, and merely ask for its ramifications.<\/p>\n

To summarize, I believe the discomfort with non-manipulated causes represents a confusion between model utilization and model construction. In the former phase counterfactual sentences are well defined regardless of whether the antecedent is manipulable. It is only when we are asked to evaluate a counterfactual sentence by intuitive, unaided judgment, that we feel discomfort and we are provoked to question whether the counterfactual is “well defined”. Counterfactuals are always well defined relative to a given model, regardless of whether the antecedent is manipulable or not.<\/p>\n

This takes us to the key question of whether our models should be informed by the the manipulability restriction and how. Interventionists attempt to convince us that the very concept of causation hinges on manipulability and, hence, that a causal model void of manipulability information is incomplete, if not meaningless. We saw above that SEM, as a representation of scientific knowledge, manages quite well without the manipulability restriction. I would therefore be eager to hear from interventionists what their conception is of “scientific knowledge”, and whether they can envision an alternative to SEM which is informed by the manipulability restriction, and yet provides a parsimonious account of that which we know about the world.<\/p>\n

My appeal to interventionists to provide alternatives to SEM has so far not been successful. Perhaps readers care to suggest some? The comment section below is open for suggestions, disputations and clarifications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The second part of our latest post “David Freedman, Statistics, and Structural Equation Models” (May 6, 2015) has stimulated a lively email discussion among colleagues from several disciplines. In what follows, I will be sharing the highlights of the discussion, together with my own position on the issue of manipulability. Many of the discussants noted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10,11,20,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-causal-effect","category-definition","category-discussion","category-intuition","category-structural-equations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}