First, rewind around twenty years to the early 2000s. Back then, the study of causation was in a very different place People offering counterfactual theories of causation were in the business of trying to give necessary and sufficient conditions

One way to do this would be to say: C is the cause of E iff: If C had not happened, E would not have happened That simple analysis doesn’t work, so the people trying to give necessary and sufficient conditions kept adding more and more epicycles