In April, 2010, a BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded. Since then, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil have leaked into the Gulf. One question that has been on the minds of people everywhere is: Why?
The question "Why?" seeks causal information.
After hearing so much discussion about this explosion on the radio, I thought it would be useful to talk a bit about people's ability to think and reason about causes. In this first post, I'll focus on what causes are. In the next post, I'll start to talk about how people structure their knowledge about causes.
We care about causes in situations like this for many reasons. For one thing, we want to know who and what to blame for the mess in the Gulf. Those individuals and companies responsible for the accident will probably have to pay millions of dollars in damages.
For another thing, causal knowledge will help us to prevent accidents like this in the future.
Understanding the factors that caused the explosion and the leak will help people in the industry to ensure that similar problems do not happen again in the future.
One factor that makes causes so hard to think about is that there is never just one cause of any event in the world. There are many reasons why there are many causes.
First, every cause really is an answer to the question why? For almost every event, there are different "why" questions that you might ask.
In the case of the oil rig explosion, we might be asking why we are drilling in the Gulf of Mexico in the first place. In that case, the explanation involves factors about the world's oil supply and the economics and politics of oil purchases.
However, we might also be interested in the mechanisms that failed to operate properly at the sea floor, in which case the explanation involves flaws in the blow-out preventer, the concrete around it, and perhaps dead batteries in key pieces of equipment.
We might also be interested in why faulty equipment could have been installed in the first place. For this question, the causal explanation might focus on the relationships among companies that seek oil around the world and those that build and operate oil rigs.
None of these factors is the causal explanation. Each of them is a causal explanation that relates to a particular "why" question.
A second complexity in reasoning about causes is that causes combine in explanations to form chains. For example one (of many) possible explanations for the leak is that faulty concrete caused a buildup of methane gas in the well, which caused an explosion that blew out the cap on the well. This explosion may also have damaged the blowout preventer, which is a device that is supposed to seal the well to keep oil from leaking out. The damaged (or perhaps faulty) blowout preventer allowed oil to spew into the Gulf of Mexico.
What makes this kind of causal reasoning difficult is that one cause leads to another, which leads to yet another. It is hard to know when to stop your explanation, because there is almost always another event that caused the first one in the chain. (We could ask, for example, what caused the faulty concrete to be poured during the well's construction.) In addition, one causal factor can cause many consequences (like the explosion in this explanation which may have caused both the damage to the cap of oil well and also the damage to the blowout preventer).
So, why should you care about causes?
In some cases, our desire to know about causes is just raw human curiosity. There isn't much practical significance for most of us to know why this oil rig exploded, but it is a strange and unique event, and humans seem wired to want to know why these strange events occur.
However, causal knowledge is also the engine of innovation and creativity. It is nearly impossible to create a new solution to a problem without understanding the causal forces at work that led to the problem in the first place. So, if you have any interest in solving new problems, it would help you to learn more about the way you think about causal information.
In the next post in this series, I'll talk about the basic kinds of causes that people know about and how they are able to combine them.
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