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  1. Counterfactuals are often described as 'retrospective,' focusing on hypothetical alternatives to a realized past. This description relates to an often implicit assumption about the structure and stability of exogenous variables in the system being modeled --- an assumption that is reasonable in many settings where counterfactuals are used. In this work, we consider cases where we might reasonably make a different assumption about exogenous variables; namely, that the exogenous noise terms of each unit do exhibit some unit-specific structure and/or stability. This leads us to a different use of counterfactuals --- a forward-looking rather than retrospective counterfactual. We introduce "counterfactual treatment choice," a type of treatment choice problem that motivates using forward-looking counterfactuals. We then explore how mismatches between interventional versus forward-looking counterfactual approaches to treatment choice, consistent with different assumptions about exogenous noise, can lead to counterintuitive results. 
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  2. null (Ed.)
    In this paper we propose a causal modeling approach to intersectional fairness, and a flexible, task-specific method for computing intersectionally fair rankings. Rankings are used in many contexts, ranging from Web search to college admissions, but causal inference for fair rankings has received limited attention. Additionally, the growing literature on causal fairness has directed little attention to intersectionality. By bringing these issues together in a formal causal framework we make the application of intersectionality in algorithmic fairness explicit, connected to important real world effects and domain knowledge, and transparent about technical limitations. We experimentally evaluate our approach on real and synthetic datasets, exploring its behavior under different structural assumptions. 
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