Front cover image for The book of why : the new science of cause and effect

The book of why : the new science of cause and effect

Judea Pearl (Author), Dana Mackenzie (Author)
"Everyone has heard the claim, "Correlation does not imply causation." What might sound like a reasonable dictum metastasized in the twentieth century into one of science's biggest obstacles, as a legion of researchers became unwilling to make the claim that one thing could cause another. Even two decades ago, asking a statistician a question like "Was it the aspirin that stopped my headache?" would have been like asking if he believed in voodoo, or at best a topic for conversation at a cocktail party rather than a legitimate target of scientific inquiry. Scientists were allowed to posit only that the probability that one thing was associated with another. This all changed with Judea Pearl, whose work on causality was not just a victory for common sense, but a revolution in the study of the world"-- Provided by publisher
eBook, English, 2018
First edition View all formats and editions
Basic Books, New York, 2018
1 online resource (unpaged) : illustrations
9780465097616, 9781541616981, 0465097618, 1541616987
1022084797
The ladder of causation
From buccaneers to guinea pigs: the genesis of causal inference
From evidence to causes: Reverend Bayes meets Mr. Holmes
Confounding and deconfounding: or, slaying the lurking variable
The smoke-filled debate: clearing the air
Paradoxes galore!
Beyond adjustment: the conquest of Mt. Intervention
Counterfactuals: mining worlds that could have been
Mediation: the search for a mechanism
Big data, artificial intelligence, and the big questions