Beware the Confident Counterfactual by Jay Ulfelder.
From the post:
Did you anticipate the Syrian uprising that began in 2011? What about the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan uprisings that preceded and arguably shaped it? Did you anticipate that Assad would survive the first three years of civil war there, or that Iraq’s civil war would wax again as intensely as it has in the past few days?
All of these events or outcomes were difficult forecasting problems before they occurred, and many observers have been frank about their own surprise at many of them. At the same time, many of those same observers speak with confidence about the causes of those events. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 surely is or is not the cause of the now-raging civil war in that country. The absence of direct US or NATO military intervention in Syria is or is not to blame for continuation of that country’s civil war and the mass atrocities it has brought—and, by extension, the resurgence of civil war in Iraq.
But here’s the thing: strong causal claims require some confidence about how history would have unfolded in the absence of the cause of interest, and those counterfactual histories are no easier to get right than observed history was to anticipate.
Like all of the most interesting questions, what causality means and how we might demonstrate it will forever be matters for debate—see here on Daniel Little’s blog for an overview of that debate’s recent state—but most conceptions revolve around some idea of necessity. When we say X caused Y, we usually mean that had X not occurred, Y wouldn’t have happened, either. Subtler or less stringent versions might center on salience instead of necessity and insert a “probably” into the final phrase of the previous sentence, but the core idea is the same.
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A post to keep in mind when the “…I told you so…” claims start about recent prisoner releases by the United States.