[HN Gopher] Review: The Book of Why
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       Review: The Book of Why
        
       Author : pizzicato
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2021-03-07 20:57 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tachy.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tachy.org)
        
       | breck wrote:
       | I like the "Ladder of causation":                   Rung 1:
       | Associations, observational data (seeing)         Rung 2:
       | Intervention (doing)         Rung 3: Counterfactuals (imagining)
       | 
       | I often go in reverse order--let's figure out the cheapest clever
       | ways to prove ship will sink (imagining). Then if it seems like
       | it might float let's build it and throw it on the pond (doing).
       | Then if it seems to float let's hop on board and see what
       | happens.
        
       | kenjackson wrote:
       | I feel like I've tried to read several writings on this topic,
       | mostly by Pearl. I feel like I'm good during the intro and
       | motivation, but once it gets to the meat I'm completely lost. I
       | feel like this is an area that would provide rich value if I
       | could ever understand it.
        
       | neatze wrote:
       | Does Judea Pearl other books overlap with The Book of Why ?
        
         | michelpp wrote:
         | Yes. To me The Book of Why is sort of an approachable summary
         | of his whole career culminating in his work on causal
         | inference.
        
       | michelpp wrote:
       | Brady Neal has a great video course on the subject with slides
       | and readings including Pearl and others:
       | 
       | https://www.bradyneal.com/causal-inference-course
        
       | bachmeier wrote:
       | > This book dwells on the history of statistics a lot, and
       | statisticians, as the authors would have you believe, are zealots
       | who have conspired to keep causal thinking out of their field
       | right from the start. That is, until Pearl instigated the "Causal
       | Revolution", as he dubs it, the latest and greatest gift to
       | modern science. I have no dog in this fight, but Pearl (whom I
       | assume is the source of most of these opinions put to paper by
       | Mackenzie) often comes across as wildly biased and grandiose. For
       | what it's worth, I doubt that statisticians as a whole are
       | anywhere as malicious or ignorant as they're portrayed in this
       | book.
       | 
       | This is correct AFAICT (I'm not a statistician even though I read
       | a lot of the statistics literature). The strange thing is that
       | I've never seen any obvious benefits to his comments of this
       | nature. In the most generous possible reading, they are a
       | distraction, with a less generous reading being that you can't
       | trust his interpretation of anything.
        
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