Cause and Effect

When we are studying a problem, we always want to know the cause and the effect. It seems really easy to find causality that people just need to follow the logic; however, in reality, it is much more difficult because there are so many ways to explain what is happening in the real world, and most of the explanations can be reasonably accepted, people can find different causalities based on the explanations they choose. People have proposed various ways to identify a causality.

Some people look at the timeline that the cause comes before the effect. Is this a valid solution? Yes, it is. The problem is that we have to identify the cause and the effect are actually the cause and the effect that the two objects do have a correlation between them. For example, recently some US politicians suggest that the video games are the cause of increasing number of mass shootings in the US. Is this claim reasonable? It follows the pattern that the cause comes before the effect that the video games appeared much earlier than the significant increase in mass shootings in the US (of course, the politicians also provide the explanations of how video games contribute to increasing mass shootings) . However, there are a lot more things which happened before the significant increase in mass shootings, can we say all these things are the causes of increasing mass shootings? Obviously we cannot, we have to find the significance of the correlation between these two objects first, then look at the causality.

Of course, there are other ways to help identify causality which I will talk about later.