Hacker News with Generative AI: Causality

Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review (2021) (cold-takes.com)
There's an interesting theory out there that X causes Y. If this were true, it would be pretty important. So I did a deep-dive into the academic literature on whether X causes Y. Here's what I found.

Science, Research, Causality

232 points by l0b0 8 days ago | 103 comments

Chrono: A Peer-to-Peer Network with Verifiable Causality (arxiv.org)
Logical clocks are a fundamental tool to establish causal ordering of events in a distributed system.

Distributed Systems, Peer-to-Peer Networks, Computer Science, Causality

8 points by wslh 20 days ago | 1 comments

The Dome (2005) (sites.pitt.edu)
While exotic theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity violate our common expectations of causation and determinism, one routinely assumes that ordinary Newtonian mechanics will violate these expectations only in extreme circumstances if at all. That is not so. Even quite simple Newtonian systems can harbor uncaused events and ones for which the theory cannot even supply probabilities.

Physics, Science, Causality, Newtonian Mechanics

45 points by Tomte 49 days ago | 38 comments

A short introduction to Interval Tree Clocks (2017) (separateconcerns.com)
One of the things I work on at Lima is master-master filesystem replication. In this kind of system, we need to track causality. In a nutshell, given two events modifying a given piece of data and originating from different nodes in the system, we want to know if one of those events could have influenced the other one, or in other words if one of those events “happened before” the other one.

Distributed Systems, Causality, Data Structures, Algorithms

88 points by LAC-Tech 91 days ago | 21 comments

Revealing causal links in complex systems: New algorithm shows hidden influences (techxplore.com)
Getting to the heart of causality is central to understanding the world around us. What causes one variable—be it a biological species, a voting region, a company stock, or a local climate—to shift from one state to another can inform how we might shape that variable in the future.

Causality, Algorithm, Complex Systems, Science

133 points by wglb 108 days ago | 22 comments

Revealing causal links in complex systems (news.mit.edu)
Getting to the heart of causality is central to understanding the world around us. What causes one variable — be it a biological species, a voting region, a company stock, or a local climate — to shift from one state to another can inform how we might shape that variable in the future.

Causality, Complex Systems, Science

42 points by gnabgib 112 days ago | 9 comments

Dispelling Myths about Randomisation (bps.org.uk)
When we are interested in cause and effect relationships (which is much of the time!) we have two options: We can simply observe the world to identify associations between X and Y, or we can randomise people to different levels of X and then measure Y.

Statistics, Research Methods, Causality

45 points by domofutu 118 days ago | 45 comments

When is causal broadcast not enough for causal memory? (decomposition.al)
While getting ready to teach my grad distributed systems course this fall, I found myself once again flipping through Cheriton and Skeen’s rather scathing 1993 article “Understanding the limitations of causally and totally ordered communication”.1 One of Cheriton and Skeen’s complaints about causally ordered communication is that it does not enforce the ordering constraints that they care about. They write: