[cap-talk] Three Types of Causality revisited (was: Analyzing Authority with CSP - link broken)

[Mark S. Miller]

Toby Murray wrote:
> MarkM: I have a feeling that you've thought about causation and
> authority a bit before. I came across the 'causation' page on
> erights.org the other day. This work is a first attempt to try to build
> a formal notion of authority from causation.

Do you mean <http://erights.org/decision/causality/three-types.html>? Thanks 
for reminding me. In terms of the taxonomy I explain on that page, I'd say:

* Horton supports an analog of "Moral Causality" -- tracking who should be 
held responsible for an action, whether or not they actually caused it in the 
other senses of the term.

* The authority analysis that you and Fred are doing uses an analog of "The 
Causality of the Physicist". However, the treatment of non-determinism leads 
to differences. For safe reasoning about confidentiality, we must take account 
of causation through specificational non-determinism, i.e., covert channels. 
For safe reasoning about integrity, Fred's thesis explains why he can safely 
ignore covert channels. Potential overt causation is somehow usefully more 
constrained than "The Causality of the Physicist", but in ways not captured by 
that web page.

* Why do debuggers gain such leverage from allowing us to navigate the call 
stack? The call stack represents only a very tiny fraction of the causal paths 
in our programs, but these causal paths seems to have a peculiarly high hit 
rate at helping us to understand what when wrong. The call stack (and 
hopefully, by analogy, Causeway 
<http://erights.org/elang/tools/causeway/index.html>) is perhaps like a "story 
telling" view of what happened, providing us an analog of "Explanatory Causality".

I don't think I had these three tie-ins in mind when I wrote the essay, but I 
do think they work. Do others find this taxonomy useful?


> Thanks for the interest, btw. It's exciting to know someone else is
> interested in this work.

Indeed. And thank you for doing interesting work!

-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

     Cheers,
     --MarkM