Physics

From earliest infancy, we live in and learn to function in a world of causes and effects. Yet science has had an ambivalent, even hostile attitude toward causation for more than a century. Statistics courses teach us that “correlation is not causation,” yet they are strangely silent about what is causation.

A central reason for this silence is that causation does not reside in data alone, but in the process that generates the data. In order to answer causal questions, like “What would happen if we lowered the price of toothpaste?” or “Should I brake for this object?” we need a model of causes and effects. Judea Pearl has developed a simple calculus for expressing our cause-effect knowledge in a diagram and using that diagram to tell us how to interpret the data we gather from the real world. His methods are already transforming the practice of statistics and could equip future artificial intelligences with causal reasoning abilities they currently lack.

This talk is largely based on Mackenzie’s book co-written with Pearl, The Book of Why.