Counterfactuals are not causality
The author doesn&#x27;t know what causation is. Heck not even correlation establishes causation so OF course a counterfactual can&#x27;t establish causation.<p>Not only are counterfactuals infinite in number but ALL hypothesis are infinite in number. You can literally say ANYTHING about why something didn&#x27;t build. I can say someone didn&#x27;t purge some files or I can say someone purged files or I can say aliens destroyed the server with a laser. There are an infinite number of statements that can be made here and whether it&#x27;s a &quot;counterfactual&quot; is irrelevant.<p>What the author doesn&#x27;t know is that NOTHING can establish causation except for a very specific type of experiment.<p>Basically there is nothing that can establish causality UNLESS you have control over the causal switch. You flick the switch randomly and if the randomness of the switch flicking correlates with the consequence you have then have established causation. BUT you have only established it to a certain correlative degree. It is fundamentally impossible in this reality to establish causation to be 100%. True causation can never be fully verified and at best the experiment I described is the best fuzzy verification. If you truly study how science works you will find that this flaw extends to all of science and therefore reality. In reality as we know it, nothing can be proven. Proof is fundamentally impossible. If you understand this concept then you will truly understand what science is.<p>Anyway, Going to the authors Kubernetes example, his &quot;counterfactuals&quot; are basically null hypothesis and can be helpful in establishing causation but by themselves are pointless.<p>It&#x27;s simple... If you hypothesize that something didn&#x27;t build because the admins did not &quot;configure file purging&quot; then to establish causation is SIMPLE. Configure the file purging and see if your system builds. Then remove the configuration and see if the system stops building. Do this enough times and you have established causation or zero causation to a certain degree.<p>That&#x27;s it. This is science and probability and statistics. So crazy to see someone mention causality without even knowing what it really is.