Pretty much the title
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I think we still don’t know how anesthesia works but we know it causes people to go unconscious
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Yes, these are generally called empirical laws or empirical principles, which do a good job of predicting your outcomes based on conditions and causes, but is totally lacking in explaining the underlying mechanism for the cause. They are numerous and is part of research. Perhaps the measurement problem of quantum mechanics fits here (QM is one of the most successful theory out there, but it is largely empirical in its explanation and often does not have any grasp of the underlying mechanism involved; check out the quantum bomb thought experiment if you’re interested in just how absurd it can all be and it’s empirically verified).
In contrast there are also laws that do a good job of explaining the underlying mechanism (causes), but suck at making predictions due to complexity, this is most famously perhaps evolution. We can explain species dynamics and everything with it, but we cannot predict things like “when will crows be dominantly white-feathered?”.
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Yes.
The simplest ELI5 example I can think of would be “everyone who ate poison died, and everyone who didn’t eat poison survived, so poison kills people, but we have no idea how or why”
Yes it is common in biology experiments. You prove doing something does something else by breaking it in two different ways, and then fixing it at least once. Then you can untangle actually what the hell you managed to do.
I say no, but it’s good enough for modern medicine. We have no clue how most approved drugs work. We only recently discovered the mechanism that makes aspirin work.
Isn’t that exactly how science is supposed to work? You observe something causing something else and then you try to figure out why.
If you don’t know the mechanism then you have a correlation, it could be a great correlation but still you don’t know the cause. To establish causation you need to have a mechanism and an underlying theory that explains the phenomena, e.g. gravity for things falling. Even then causation is very hard to achieve, perhaps impossible, since at the end of the day it’s always a correlation of experimental observations.
Yes, absolutely! This is very common in medicine. We know antidepressants are effective in depression and anxiety without a robust theory of action. We also know psychotherapy is effective without really knowing why. Lots of competing theories for both but so far no principled or empirical path to a solution.
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