The same is true for homicide. Though we might try to explain a murder using simple cause-and-effect logic (e.g., “He learned his wife was having an affair so he killed her”), it doesn’t aid prediction to think this way. Like the earthquake, violence is one outcome of a process that started way before this man got married. If you were making a prediction of what a friend of yours might do if he lost his job, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, he’ll commit suicide” unless there were many other PINs of suicide present. You’d see the loss of his job as a single link, not the whole chain.
