uhApr 10, 2024

Ch. 5 #JuarreroBook “Why context matters- an Interlude”

To illustrate the role of context ch. 5 uses C-19 and other infectious diseases to introduce widely used notions in epidemiology: direct, indirect, and total effects of an intervention such as vaccination.

These seem to be recast as ‘effects of context’ (e.g., ‘indirect effects of context dependent phenomena’).

J notes (p. 66) “Indirect and total effects are not anomalies; they are real, but top-down, mereological effects of a transformed collective dynamic (marked by a different periodicity and different parameters). It all depends on the role context plays in some disease dynamics.

and “independence or dependence on context is itself dependent on the scale and periodicity of that embedding context. It might be necessary to look further back in time and/or zoom out spatially to reveal the scale at which context dependence kicks in or washes out. Independence or dependence on contextual constraints at each of those scales and time frames, however, is real. Context dependence is not subj., it is objective, but rather relational- and induced by constraints” (pg. 60)

(comment on Context Changes Everything, p. 66)

BookWyrm

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Show threadDimitri Mollo

@uh @[email protected] @[email protected] what did you think of this recasting of the epidemiology stuff in terms of contextual and 'mereological' factors? It struck me as just a terminological variant that does not add much. I'm also a bit confused as she seems to be going into context-dependent constraints before she actually explains what they are, which is supposed to happen in the next chapter...

#JuarreroBook

Dimitri Coelho Mollo (@[email protected])

810 Posts, 732 Following, 800 Followers · Assistant Professor in Philosophy of AI at Umeå University, working on and at the foundations of the sciences of mind and cognition. Searchable through tootfinder.

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Apr 11, 2024 at 12:26pmWeb
Show threadDimitri Coelho MolloApr 11, 2024

@[email protected] @UlrikeHahn @uh Just saw that you had already formulated similar questions over here that for some reason I missed on bookwyrm!

I fully agree about the case for top-down causation being rather weak with the epidemiology example, as those population-level dynamics indeed seem to be just a matter of inter-individual interactions (so nothing over and above them).

Show threadDimitri Coelho MolloApr 11, 2024
@[email protected] @UlrikeHahn @uh in a sense, achieving herd immunity may change people's behaviour, but that's also the sort of normal causal relations we would expect: if people believe they are safer because of herd immunity, they will behave differently, etc., but then the cause is the belief, transmitted socially, etc., rather than the population-level property per se.
Show threadUlrike HahnApr 12, 2024

@dcm @[email protected] @uh

A plausible example of the kind of emergent whole that's a candidate for downward causation is a traffic jam (TJ)-

TJs have properties like location, duration, and movement. These are arguably props. of the TJ not the indiv. cars (because e.g., the TJ's 'movement' is in the opposite direction of the individual cars & different speed (when viewed in time lapse..).

But pop. herd immunity strikes me as a short hand for a complex situation not a 'property'

1/2

Show threadUlrike HahnApr 12, 2024

@dcm @[email protected] @uh
2/2
I'd argue we see this from the fact that a percentage (e.g., 95% = herd immun.threshold) is a simplification/approximation that ignores network structure. If all unvaxxed 5% are in a local cluster, they won't be protected just because the threshold has been met.

The true causal process unfolds across the contact network. So herd immunity isn't a causally efficacious property of "population" - it's a conceptual shorthand.