One could actually try to learn proximate causes and what you can do in the short term with available resources, rather than try to get at the "fundamental causes," which are usually nebulous anyways. I have the hunch that the desire to look for ever shifting "real causes" comes from the attempt to identify who is to blame for X, a produ…
One could actually try to learn proximate causes and what you can do in the short term with available resources, rather than try to get at the "fundamental causes," which are usually nebulous anyways. I have the hunch that the desire to look for ever shifting "real causes" comes from the attempt to identify who is to blame for X, a product of lawyerly thinking. I think the real problem is that, if the problem is complex enough, everyone has a share of blame if you dig deeply and honestly enough. The best thing to do there is to forget about assigning blame and try to see what can be done to ameliorate the problem as much as possible, but that invites shirking with all manner of excuses--I'm not responsible for X, so I don't want to pay for it, A acted with "malice" that led to X, so A should pay for it, etc, for which the search for the real killer, eh, underlying causes, becomes the MO.
One could actually try to learn proximate causes and what you can do in the short term with available resources, rather than try to get at the "fundamental causes," which are usually nebulous anyways. I have the hunch that the desire to look for ever shifting "real causes" comes from the attempt to identify who is to blame for X, a product of lawyerly thinking. I think the real problem is that, if the problem is complex enough, everyone has a share of blame if you dig deeply and honestly enough. The best thing to do there is to forget about assigning blame and try to see what can be done to ameliorate the problem as much as possible, but that invites shirking with all manner of excuses--I'm not responsible for X, so I don't want to pay for it, A acted with "malice" that led to X, so A should pay for it, etc, for which the search for the real killer, eh, underlying causes, becomes the MO.