Rasputian Causality

There's an exaggerated (but not all that exaggerated) account of the death of Rasputin that goes something like this: the controversial monk was, within the space of a few hours, poisoned, shot, bludgeoned, shot again, and then dumped into an icy Russian River where he drowned.

If we were to accept this account, we would have to say that the cause of death was drowning, but even if he had never been thrown in the water, he almost certainly would have died at roughly the same time from the poison or the gunshot wounds or the blows to his head.

More generally, this is an example of a causal relationship where removing the cause does not change the outcome. There are real-world implications to this idea. When we try to apply causal reasoning to practical problems like determining public policy, we almost always do so under the assumption that manipulating causes will change outcomes. That's not always true.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the case of multiple necessary conditions. This was very much the case in the 2016 election and something that most of the attempts at analysis wrong. Almost every piece you read with the headline "________ caused Trump to win" is fundamentally flawed. We almost certainly have here the opposite of the murder of Rasputin. We have a list of factors the removal of any one of which would have changed the outcome. We can debate exactly what goes on the list, but there's not much question that it includes Russian election hacking, conservative media misinformation, mainstream media false balance (particularly and perhaps primarily from the New York Times), irresponsible behavior from the FBI, and voter suppression. In terms of culpability, everyone responsible for any item on that list is responsible for what's happening to the country now and will continue to happen for the next few years.

Or, in other words, there's plenty of blame to go around.

While we're on the subject, there's this really weird movie from 1980.