Very rarely does someone pick up a language without either studying it or living in a country where the language is spoken. But many depressed people feel better over time even if they don't take any medication. So the difference between the two cases is whether the outcome is common even for people who don't take the given action.
The first case feels obvious because my internal world model predicted that you would be able to speak Japanese with a high probability given the context. That world model prediction was based on directly observing and hearing about many different kinds of people who have learned to speak different languages through dedicated practice (and likewise observing that people who don't practice speaking different languages are not capable of speaking different languages). Me claiming that "You were able to speak Japanese because of the Japanese lessons." is communicating that, had I spoke to you before you learned Japanese, I would've been willing to make a large bet that you would indeed be able to speak Japanese in the future after following the regimen described.
On the flip side, my internal world model did not assign a high probability to the depressed person being happy two years in the future given the context, which is why the causal claim doesn't feel obvious. That world model prediction was based on directly observing and hearing about many different kinds of people who have taken antidepressants and not been able to pull out of their depression, although some have (and likewise observing that some depressed people who don't take antidepressants can overcome their depression, although many don't). Me claiming that "I don't know if the person was able to overcome their depression because of the Prozac." is communicating that, had we spoke before the person started taking Prozac, I wouldn't have been willing to bet anything but a relatively small amount of money on them being happy in two years.
> The only person who might even pause when answering this question is someone who has spent the last two years learning causal inference rather than a new language.
LOL feeling personally attacked...
I agree with other commenters, what stands out is the lack of (reasonable) alternative causes for the learning japanese example. With overcoming depression, it's easy to imagine that beyond medication there are effects of therapy or interference due to socialization with peers, etc.
Like Matty said, I can’t really think of another causal mechanism for learning Japanese. Maybe you lied and, actually, you spent a few years with a Japanese family in Los Angeles and you learned only 5% of your skills through the lessons. It’s possible but if your account is truthful, this is not what happened. In contrast, there’s a large number of possible causal mechanisms for overcoming depression (doing nothing, doing something, making friends, dropping toxic relations, therapy, medication, changing jobs, staying at job, but with a different outlook, being more realistic, being more ambitious …). It’s not well understood.
I like Matty's response. Here's another, maybe related, argument:
We have a reasonably-good theory of *how* the Japanese lessons help acquiring conversation ability in Japanese. By "theory" here I'm willing to include "folk-psychology" level theories as well. Sure, we probably can't relate the lessons to the underlying neural processes that somehow enable speaking japanese. But that doesn't matter as much, because the phenomenon (speaking japanese) and the explanation are somehow at the same "ontological level" (of, say, "behavior").
By contrast in the depression story, we really have no good theory to explain the "how". The mechanistic explanation that we *could* give (say, regulating Serotonin levels in the brain) for the "cause" is on a completely different level than the phenomenon we wish to explain on the "effect" (depression and getting out of it). And without a very convincing way to bridge the levels (which we don't have), the explanation feels weaker.
one answer has to do with our idea of the competing explanations. if you live your usual berkeley life without japanese lessons, there doesn't seems to be another way of "accidentally" learning conversational japanese. but someone suffering from depression may crawl out of it in a number of ways. it might be that the prozac made it easier to do so, but it's not the only possible explanation.
(i think this is similar to matty's comment below.)
I could give several explanations. Confounding, for one, but that's too clever by half. The other one, though, is the possibility of external evaluation/measurement and feedback in the case of learning a language versus self-reporting of internal states in the case of treatment for depression.
Very rarely does someone pick up a language without either studying it or living in a country where the language is spoken. But many depressed people feel better over time even if they don't take any medication. So the difference between the two cases is whether the outcome is common even for people who don't take the given action.
The first case feels obvious because my internal world model predicted that you would be able to speak Japanese with a high probability given the context. That world model prediction was based on directly observing and hearing about many different kinds of people who have learned to speak different languages through dedicated practice (and likewise observing that people who don't practice speaking different languages are not capable of speaking different languages). Me claiming that "You were able to speak Japanese because of the Japanese lessons." is communicating that, had I spoke to you before you learned Japanese, I would've been willing to make a large bet that you would indeed be able to speak Japanese in the future after following the regimen described.
On the flip side, my internal world model did not assign a high probability to the depressed person being happy two years in the future given the context, which is why the causal claim doesn't feel obvious. That world model prediction was based on directly observing and hearing about many different kinds of people who have taken antidepressants and not been able to pull out of their depression, although some have (and likewise observing that some depressed people who don't take antidepressants can overcome their depression, although many don't). Me claiming that "I don't know if the person was able to overcome their depression because of the Prozac." is communicating that, had we spoke before the person started taking Prozac, I wouldn't have been willing to bet anything but a relatively small amount of money on them being happy in two years.
> The only person who might even pause when answering this question is someone who has spent the last two years learning causal inference rather than a new language.
LOL feeling personally attacked...
I agree with other commenters, what stands out is the lack of (reasonable) alternative causes for the learning japanese example. With overcoming depression, it's easy to imagine that beyond medication there are effects of therapy or interference due to socialization with peers, etc.
Like Matty said, I can’t really think of another causal mechanism for learning Japanese. Maybe you lied and, actually, you spent a few years with a Japanese family in Los Angeles and you learned only 5% of your skills through the lessons. It’s possible but if your account is truthful, this is not what happened. In contrast, there’s a large number of possible causal mechanisms for overcoming depression (doing nothing, doing something, making friends, dropping toxic relations, therapy, medication, changing jobs, staying at job, but with a different outlook, being more realistic, being more ambitious …). It’s not well understood.
I like Matty's response. Here's another, maybe related, argument:
We have a reasonably-good theory of *how* the Japanese lessons help acquiring conversation ability in Japanese. By "theory" here I'm willing to include "folk-psychology" level theories as well. Sure, we probably can't relate the lessons to the underlying neural processes that somehow enable speaking japanese. But that doesn't matter as much, because the phenomenon (speaking japanese) and the explanation are somehow at the same "ontological level" (of, say, "behavior").
By contrast in the depression story, we really have no good theory to explain the "how". The mechanistic explanation that we *could* give (say, regulating Serotonin levels in the brain) for the "cause" is on a completely different level than the phenomenon we wish to explain on the "effect" (depression and getting out of it). And without a very convincing way to bridge the levels (which we don't have), the explanation feels weaker.
thanks for the amazing newsletter!
one answer has to do with our idea of the competing explanations. if you live your usual berkeley life without japanese lessons, there doesn't seems to be another way of "accidentally" learning conversational japanese. but someone suffering from depression may crawl out of it in a number of ways. it might be that the prozac made it easier to do so, but it's not the only possible explanation.
(i think this is similar to matty's comment below.)
I could give several explanations. Confounding, for one, but that's too clever by half. The other one, though, is the possibility of external evaluation/measurement and feedback in the case of learning a language versus self-reporting of internal states in the case of treatment for depression.