Why? Because

Cause and effect are, without a single doubt, one of the strangest couplings in our Universe. We know the score: we do X, and it causes Y. Simple as that.

Simple as that? Not really.

Indeed, whenever we do an action X, we are causing some effect Y. To be more accurate, we are enabling Y to happen—opening the door to it. If you take a hammer and smash a piggy bank, there’s a clear cause and effect right in front of your eyes. In fact, you buying a hammer several years ago at a department store signed the poor capitalist porcine’s death sentence, way before it was possible to realize these two things could possibly be connected. Or was the pig’s luck defined the moment the department store was built? Or was it when the city where the department store is located was founded? Or the country? Or the evolution of life on Earth? Or the Big Bang? Where do we stop?

We cause Xs at all times, in parallel with billions of others causing other Xs, and our Ys align and combine with billions of other Ys. Interestingly, there is usually a time lag between the moment we cause X and the moment the effects Y occur. Effects are rarely immediate; they might surface after a long, long time, appearing “out of the blue”. By being unable to see effects right away, we often double down on our actions to see the outcomes we so much long for, even though upshots may come a tad late to the party. Similar to when we are starving and we eat and eat to satisfy a hunger which does not seem to go away until it does only to realize we ate too much.

Effects of our actions are seldom discrete. Back to the hammer and the porcelain piggy analogy: the pig is either broken or unbroken. Of course you could hammer it gently to only crack it, but that’s not the point, who does that? We hammer it like there’s no tomorrow because we want the stuff it contains. But effects in life are not like fragile piggy banks. Effects of our actions are not boolean valued: done/undone, broken/unbroken, but continuous; they fluctuate in their states as they interact with effects caused by distant actions, and we might only feel their presence once crossing a certain threshold which we consider relevant for it to be noticed. Moreover, effects are not one-dimensional, nor single valued. This is, whenever we do an action, what we do is to excite a “field” of sorts (bear with me here) where multiple effects and sub-effects spread and radiate away.

In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was popularized in the twentieth century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton. What are unintended consequences after all? Our incapacity to understand how the effects of our actions interrelate to the zillion effects of zillion actions taken by others. Effects become causes causing new effects which may become causes creating new effects. This is clearly why things we didn’t cause might hit us hard. Think of the ill-fated Mike Edwards—early member of 1970s British rock group Electric Light Orchestra—who was killed in an accident when his van was crushed by a 600 kg bale of hay that fell from a tractor on nearby farmland before rolling onto the road. Think of politicians and how their arbitrary actions affect millions of us. Think of the actions taken—or not taken—by someone you don’t know nor your haven’t ever heard about whose effects directly impact you. For example someone who finally decided not to go for a loan to buy an apartment which ended up being the apartment you live in. Had this person made a different choice, you’d be living elsewhere.

My 4 years old kid is at that stage when he asks all the time “why?”. Sometimes, when he starts, we end up in strange sequences where I try to give an answer “because of this”, and he goes again “why?” and I go down a new level “because of that” and so on until our conversations get surreal. We start on things like “why is the milk so cold?” all the way to explain how electricity on the planet is generated. Bit of bad luck for him to have this nerd dad. Oh well. But what he does is something we adults do, and it’s called the why-because analysis, or WBA.

Why-Because Analysis is a technique for causally analyzing the behavior of complex things. Its primary application is in the analysis of accidents, typically in transportation systems. It is also used in safety requirements analysis during system design and development.

WBA is based on a notion of causal factor. Whether one event or state is a causal factor in the occurrence of another is determined by applying the Counterfactual Test. The Counterfactual Test was proposed by the logician David Lewis in 1975—who credited David Hume—and has withstood detailed criticism since. During the analysis, a Why-Because Graph (WB-Graph or WBG) is built showing the causal connections between all events and states of the behavior being analyzed. The completed WB-Graph is the main output of Why-Because Analysis.

David Hume argued that two occurrences are causally related as cause and effect if they pass the following test:

X is a cause for Y if, and only if, had X not happened Y could not have happened (all other things equal)

In WBA speak, it goes:

Necessary Causal Factor (NCF): Cause X is a Necessary Causal Factor, or NCF, for effect Y if X passes the Counterfactual Test for Y. Only then, X is a NCF for Y.

Test does not answer whether X is the only cause for Y. X alone may not be sufficient, other causes may be needed so that Y occurs.

I like to run Why-Because analyses of my ordinary life. Mostly for fun, and to observe how causality evolves as I grow old. This mental game has made me realize interesting things. For example, identifying that the Necessary Causal Factor that made possible I can have those funny conversations with my son in our kitchen about why the milk is so cold is a text message I sent in July 2015 to my dad. I’ll keep the WB-Graph of all that for myself.