YEP. I see weird deficits in causal thinking (and deductive thinking more generally) when I talk to biologists and biotech people who weren't trained in math/physics/CS.https://twitter.com/dallandrummond/status/1108556522467086336 …
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Of course, there are numerous counterexamples, notably of drugs that work for no known reason, or for reasons quite different from the ones they had been believed to work.
There are also many classes of actions/interventions for which knowing the cause isn't sufficient, you need to know the mechanism. e.g. if you do a GWAS and decide that gene X causes phenotype Y because they're associated, acting on this insight would be dangerous w/o mechanism.
yikes! a GWAS study is NOT knowing the cause, it's only knowing an association! I was saying causal -> actionable, not correlational -> actionable.
The criticism is not that the biologists are too mechanistic, but not mechanistic enough. They basically assume that there is no mechanism that produces the observed results, until they have discovered it. It's especially apparent in the theoretical branches of the life sciences
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