Bad news isn't wine By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari & probabilistic theories The difference between a saint and a hypocrite is that one lies for his religion, the other by it. ~ Minna Antrim

Crafting ever new news

·         Bad news does not improve with age; therefore, journalists are always engaged in crafting new bad news tailored to different times.

·         Bad news isn't wine. It doesn't improve with age. Colin Powell

Qur’an is relevant today

Qur’an is relevant today, just as it was almost 2 millennia ago. We need to learn to use it, and make it our friend throughout all stages of life, all circumstances and all experiences. Including in our student-life. 

Here are lessons of guidance from the Qur’an for students till the end of time:

1.  GRATITUDE

The first bridge connecting humanity with the divine, through His own sacred words is gratitude and appreciation.

[All] praise is [due] to Allah , Lord of the worlds  (1:2)

Bottom of Form

The Qur’an begins with loving appreciation and gratitude to Allah in a verse that is both grammatically timeless and speaker-less. Reminding us that whether anyone thanks Him or not, all gratitude and appreciation belong to Him.

As students in the developed world, we’re some of the most collectively ungrateful creatures walking under the sun. While others would give up an arm just to hold a textbook in the other, we’re complaining about everything and anything. We need to remember that foremost, if Allah has given us the time, health, faculties of thought and opportunity to be in school—any school—it’s our job to show a bit of appreciation and gratitude.  As Allah says,

And [remember] when your Lord proclaimed, ‘If you are grateful, I will surely increase you [in favor]….(14:7)

The more grateful we are for our professors, our classmates, the cafeteria food, the boring mandatory courses—the more Allah will bless our journey in ways we can’t imagine. Students in Gaza have missile holes where their blackboards are, STOP COMPLAINING — let’s be grateful for our professors, our education, our degree, our marks and our experience.

Pro tip: Say “Alḥamdulilāh” whenever you’re angry or upset at school related issues. Given how frustrating student life is, making “Alḥamdulilāh” a part of your daily vocabulary means a whole lot of blessings will be coming your way!

 

Two basic types probabilistic theories of causation 

 

 Potential Counterexamples

Given the basic probability-raising idea, one would expect putative counterexamples to probabilistic theories of causation to be of two basic types:

Cases where causes fail to raise the probabilities of their effects,

Cases where non-causes raise the probabilities of non-effects.

The discussion in the literature has focused primarily on the first sort of example.

Probability-lowering Causes. Consider the following example, due to Deborah Rosen (reported in Suppes (1970)).

(i)                 A golfer badly slices a golf ball, which heads toward the rough, but then bounces off a tree and into the cup for a hole-in-one. The golfer's slice lowered the probability that the ball would wind up in the cup, yet nonetheless caused this result. One way of avoiding this problem, suggested in Hitchcock (2004a) is to make causal claims explicitly contrastive.

Let S represent the golfer's slicing the ball, H her hitting a hole-in-one, and B be the appropriate background context. Now ~S is actually a disjunction of several alternatives: if the golfer hadn't sliced the ball, she might have hit the ball cleanly (S′), or missed it altogether (S″). Rather than saying that the golfer's slicing the ball caused the hole-in-one, and trying to analyze this claim by comparing P(H | S & B) and P(H | ~S & B), we can make two more precise contrastive claims. The golfer's slicing the ball, rather than missing entirely, caused the hole-in-one, as evidenced by the probabilities P(H | S & B) > P(H | S″ & B), but her slicing the ball rather than hitting it squarely did not cause the ball to go in the hole: P(H | S & B) < P(H | S′ & B). Hitchcock (1996) and Schaffer (2005) argue that there are a number of further advantages to taking causation to have a contrastive structure.

(ii)                Preemption.  A different sort of counterexample involves causal preemption.

Suppose that an assassin puts a weak poison in the king's drink, resulting in a 30% chance of death. The king drinks the poison and dies. If the assassin had not poisoned the drink, her associate would have spiked the drink with an even deadlier elixir (70% chance of death). In the example, the assassin caused the king to die by poisoning his drink, even though she lowered his chance of death (from 70% to 30%). Here the cause lowered the probability of death, because it preempted an even stronger cause.

One approach to this problem suggested by Dowe (2004) and Hitchcock (2004b) would be to invoke a distinction introduced in Section 2.9 above between net and component effects. The assassin's action affects the king's chances of death in two distinct ways:

First, it introduces the weak poison into the king's drink.

Second, it prevents the introduction of a stronger poison.

The net effect is to reduce the king's chance of death. Nonetheless, we can isolate the first of these effects by holding fixed the inaction of the associate: given that the associate did not in fact poison the drink, the assassin's action increased the king's chance of death (from near zero to .3). We count the assassin's action as a cause of death because it increased the chance of death along one of the routes connecting the two events.

(iii)              Probability-raising non-causes. For a counterexample of the second type, where a non-cause raises the probability of an outcome,

Suppose that two gunmen shoot at a target. Each has a certain probability of hitting, and a certain probability of missing. Assume that none of the probabilities are one or zero. As a matter of fact, the first gunman hits, and the second gunman misses. Nonetheless, the second gunman did fire, and by firing, increased the probability that the target would be hit, which it was. While it is obviously wrong to say that the second gunman's shot caused the target to be hit, it would seem that a probabilistic theory of causation is committed to this consequence. A natural approach to this problem would be to try to combine the probabilistic theory of causation with a requirement of spatiotemporal connection between cause and effect. Dowe (2004) proposes an account along these lines.