what causes this

[nathaniel 0]

There is much hand-wringing about what it means for one thing to cause another. The Ancient Greeks dealt with this same problem, and this is the solution that Aristotle, one of their scholars, came up with.

Material cause: "that out of which a thing comes to be, and which persists," e.g., bronze, silver, and the genus of these (= metal?).
Formal cause: "the statement of essence" "the account of what-it-is- to-be, and the parts of the account."
Efficient cause: "the primary source of change," e.g., the man who gives advice, the father (of the child).
Final cause: "the end (telos), that for the sake of which a thing is done," e.g., health (is the cause of exercise).

What does this have to do with skydiving? Many times people say "he died because ...", or "his parachute failed due to a ..." etc. Why does my canopy snivel, why do I get off heading openings, etc. This is a lexicon to help us think about asking and answering questions.

Examples (made up incident)
a. He died because his organs turned to jelly.
b. He died because when he deployed the parachute it partially opened and became entangled with his legs, causing a spin. He cut away the main but it did not separate, and his cypres fired, deploying his reserve into the tangled main. The combined entanglement did not slow him enough until impact.
c. He died because he did not cock his pilot chute.
d. He died skydiving.

Typically it seems that the media reports (d), the Final cause only. They sometimes try to get at the Formal and Efficient causes, but they usually screw it up. When people post to the incidents forum, they usually want to know the Formal cause first, and then debate and learn from the Efficient cause. Sometimes the Material cause is at issue, such as when people with prior or previously unknown health conditions die in the midst of skydiving.

When somebody asks, "what can cause this", to answer the original poster it is worth trying to find which of the causes they are after, and for everyone's sake it's usually worth discussing the others (at the risk of being verbose). And then the subject is materially beaten to death.

reference: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/4causes.htm

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[FrogNog 1]

The most important purpose of most newspapers is to sell advertising. That is my explanation for almost everything I see, right or wrong, in newspapers. The same applies to television news and many television channels, of course.

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Pull.

[narcimund 0]

This is brilliant. Exactly right. Insightful.

First Class Citizen Twice Over