Prediction, Diagnosis, and Causal Thinking in Forecasting

Imagine that you lived several thousand years ago and belonged to a tribe of methodologically sophisticated cave-dwellers. Your methodological sophistication is such that you have available to you all present day means of the methodological arsenal—details of the principles of deductive logic, probability theory, access to computational equipment, etc. However, your level of substantive knowledge lags several thousand years behind your methodological sophistication. In particular, you have little knowledge about physics, chemistry, or biology. In recent years, your tribe has noted an alarming decrease in its birth-rate. Furthermore, the tribe’s statistician estimates that unless the trend is shortly reversed, extinction is a real possibility. The tribe’s chief has accordingly launched an urgent project to determine the cause of birth. You are a member of the project team and have been assured that all means, including various forms of experimentation with human subjects, will be permitted to resolve this crucial problem.

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