it is always dangerous to treat simultaneity as causation

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

Most of you will have heard the maxim "correlation does not imply causation." Just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other does not mean that one is responsible for the other. For instance, ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don't light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagan-Dazs.

Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past.

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.

Every event can be described in different ways that can endlessly shift the cause: A person dies because their heart stopped beating, because it had insuficient blood supply, because blood was hemmorraging into the abdomen, because blood evessels burst in the abdomen, because pressure in the abdomen increased massively, because a wheel of a bus compressed the abdomen, because the bus driver failed to stop, because.....