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by wat100007 hours ago |
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upvoteby gpm7 hours ago|
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Not useless if you can identify and stop the butterflies that cause hurricanes.
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upvoteby wat100007 hours ago|
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The point is that they don’t cause hurricanes, despite the fact that some hurricanes might not have happened if not for the flapping.

I can point to at least one fatal crash that wouldn’t have happened if GPS was unavailable. Would it be reasonable to say that crash was caused by a lack of GPS jamming?

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upvoteby gpm7 hours ago|
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If I know stopping a particular butterfly from flapping its wings prevents thousands of people from dying and devastating effects on infrastructure (the typical result of a hurricane) I don't particularly care if they "cause" hurricanes I'm still stopping it. Philosophers can debate the meaning of the word "cause" all they want but it really isn't relevant.
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upvoteby wat100004 hours ago|
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That "if" is the critical thing. There's no way to know that in advance, not even probabilistically. If you try to stop prevent deaths in this way, you'll just waste your time, and you might even produce more deaths rather than fewer.

Something like GPS jamming isn't quite so bad. It's intuitively reasonable that reducing or degrading the information available to pilots will make things worse, and avoiding that is likely to improve safety. But it requires proper analysis to figure out the best thing to do, not a simplistic "this specific event wouldn't have happened if this specific fact had been different." That's what "cause" is about in a practical sense: not "what changes would have avoided this past event?" but "what changes improve our odds in the future?" And the first question isn't nearly enough to answer the second.

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