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Maybe I'm confused or misinterpreting. The first sentence of your first paragraph appears to contradict the first sentence of your second paragraph.  The two claims seem incommensurable.

The first sentence of your first paragraph appears to appeal to experiment, while the first sentence of your second paragraph seems to boil down to "Classically, X causes Y if there is a significant statistical connection twixt X and Y."  

Several problems with this view of causality as deriving from stats. First, the nature of the statistical distribution makes a huge difference. Extreme outliers will occur much more frequency in a Poisson distribution, for instance, than in a Guassian distribution. It can be very hard to... (read more)

A thoughtful discussion of efficiency. Points for metacognition: "If efficiency has really earned its poor reputation, I wonder if I should be more worried about this."

This discussion seems (to me) to conflate a number of issues that it seems to me should be separated, in the manner of a scalar getting substituted for a vector, or, even better, a dynamic vector field (i.e., tensor).

Issues conflated seem to me (I could be wrong) to include:

[1] Substitution of mathematical optimization for human values -- the difference twixt quantity and quality. Is this an issue we ought to worry about when we discuss efficiency?  If so, how should we tackle it?

[2] Difference twixt making purely... (read 1628 more words →)