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CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

(causenet.org)
229 points geetee | 2 comments | 02 Sep 25 05:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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tgv ◴[02 Sep 25 07:42 UTC] No.45100192[source]▶
This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way to express that myxomatosis is lethal for only European rabbits, not humans, nor gold fish.
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vintermann ◴[02 Sep 25 09:12 UTC] No.45100711[source]▶
As I understand it, this is a dataset of claimed causation. It should contain vaccines->autism, not because it's true, but because someone, in public, claimed that it was.

So, by design, it's pretty useless for finding new, true causes. But maybe it's useful for something else, such as teaching a model what a causal claim is in a deeper sense? Or mapping out causal claims which are related somehow? Or conflicting? Either way, it's about humans, not about ontological truth.

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1. morpheuskafka ◴[02 Sep 25 09:40 UTC] No.45100849[source]▶
Also, it seems to mistake some definitions as causes.

A coronavirus isn't "claimed" to cause SARS. Rather, SARS is a name given to the disease cause by a certain coronavirus. Or alternatively, the name SARS-nCov-1 is the name given to the virus which causes SARS. Whichever way you want to see it.

For a more obvious example, saying "influenza virus causes influenza" is a tautology, not a causal relationship. If influenza virus doesn't cause influenza disease, then there is no such thing as an influenza virus.

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2. vintermann ◴[02 Sep 25 10:17 UTC] No.45101104[source]▶
Yes, I agree there are a lot of definitions or descriptions masquerading as explanations, especially in medicine and psychology. I think maybe insurance has a lot to do that. If you just describe a lot of symptoms, insurance won't know whether to cover it or not. But if you authoritatively name that symptom set as "BWZK syndrome" or something, and suddenly switch to assuming "BWZK syndrome" is a thing, the unknown cause to the symptoms, then insurance has something it can deal with.

But this description->explanation thing, whatever the reason, is just another error people make. It's not that different from errors like "vaccines cause autism". Any dataset collecting causal claims people make is going to contain a lot of nonsense.