M. P. Wellman and M. Henrion, "Explaining 'explaining away'," in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 287-292, March 1993, doi: 10.1109/34.204911.
Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/204911

Explaining "Explaining Away" 

Explaining Away is a pattern of reasoning by which the presence of one cause of a phenomenon reduces the need to invoke the proposition of alternative causes or patterns in which variables may relate to each other.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

The statistical procedure of controlling for everthing that can be measured is misguided. 

For instance, in a collider $A\rightarrow B \leftarrow C$ where the path between $A$ and $C$ is initially independent, controlling for B would make them dependnet due to the explain-away effect. This means that a back-door is opened.

Also, controlling for descendents of the varibles we are interested in should also be avoided. This is like "partially" controlling for the interested variable itself. 

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