A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
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A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
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Re: A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
#2Recent appearance on Sam Harris podcast, I quite enjoyed it....
https://samharris.org/podcasts/164-cause-effect/
#164 - Cause & Effect - A Conversation with Judea Pearl
August 5, 2019
In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Judea Pearl about his work on the mathematics of causality and artificial intelligence. They discuss how science has generally failed to understand causation, different levels of causal inference, counterfactuals, the foundations of knowledge, the nature of possibility, the illusion of free will, artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, and other topics.
Judea Pearl is a computer scientist and philosopher, known for his work in AI and the development of Bayesian networks, as well as his theory of causal and counterfactual inference. He is a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. In 2011, he was awarded with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science. He is the author of The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (coauthored with Dana Mackenzie) among other titles.
Twitter: @yudapearl
Re: A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
#3I like the review, but the criticism of distinguishing causality from counterfactual reasoning feels weak to me. Do we actually care about the counterfactual reasoning most? Of course. But establishing causality as its own thing before counterfactuals is necessary in the way that Pearl has structured his math. And even the grammar of human languages enforces this separation of concepts. Do you need causality to even have the concept of counterfactual? Of course. Is there value in describing that causality before going on to counterfactuals? Yes I think so, because of the difficulties of current counterfactual algorithms.
Separating out causality opens the door to doing counterfactual reasoning in better ways. Since whatever method is in the Book of Why confused the reviewer, it's probably not the best way to look at counterfactuals, so the causality bits can be taken without establishing the counterfactual methods as the be-all end-all.
For that matter, DAGs versus cyclic directed graphs or time-based DAGS is still a big concern too. Many if not most of our causal reasoning will have loops, when time is not accounted for, and DAG formulations make this difficult to unroll. There may be big improvements in causal modeling, without considering the counterfactuals even.
Also, in Pearl's prior 2000 book on Causality, it's clear that Pearl gave plenty of credit to Spirtes, and it always seemed that they were working in parallel and on very similar problems; I'm not sure how much Spirtes took from Pearl, but Pearl makes clear that his ideas are heavily informed by Spirtes' work.
Re: A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
#4See also a review by Andrew Gelman:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/08/book-pearl...
Re: A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
#5I had a chance to see Judea Pearl speak at a high-end mathematics conference a few years ago, and asked him personally afterwards about a few things in his talk.. I did not get much satisfaction in the admittedly brief exchange, and therefore unfortunately my impression was that there was some smoke-and-mirrors aspect to his talk, I would guess for some competitive reasons I don't know.. however, the company on stage at that event were of the highest rigor, so take this as you will...
Re: A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
#6I like the review, but the criticism of distinguishing causality from counterfactual reasoning feels weak to me. Do we actually care about the counterfactual reasoning most? Of course. But establishing causality as its own thing before counterfactuals is necessary in the way that Pearl has structured his math. And even the grammar of human languages enforces this separation of concepts. Do you need causality to even…
I am not sure how to define "cause" without introducing counterfactuals.
"This happened because I did that" seems to imply "Had I not done that, this would not have happened" -- a counterfactual.
Re: A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
#7I like the review, but the criticism of distinguishing causality from counterfactual reasoning feels weak to me. Do we actually care about the counterfactual reasoning most? Of course. But establishing causality as its own thing before counterfactuals is necessary in the way that Pearl has structured his math. And even the grammar of human languages enforces this separation of concepts. Do you need causality to even…
I am not sure how to define "cause" without introducing counterfactuals. "This happened because I did that" seems to imply "Had I not done that, this would not have happened" -- a counterfactual.
I'm not sure that's always the case.
Couldn't you have a scenario where your action was the direct cause of an outcome that might have come about some other way without your involvement at all?
For instance, if a ball rolls down a hill because you pushed it, but a breeze blows a moment after you pushed the ball, if that breeze was strong enough to push the ball down the hill too, then you have a scenario where "that ball went down the hill because I pushed it" is true, but "had I not pushed the ball, it would not have rolled down this hill" is not true.
Re: A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
#8I like the review, but the criticism of distinguishing causality from counterfactual reasoning feels weak to me. Do we actually care about the counterfactual reasoning most? Of course. But establishing causality as its own thing before counterfactuals is necessary in the way that Pearl has structured his math. And even the grammar of human languages enforces this separation of concepts. Do you need causality to even…
I have only read part of this book, so far.
I think counter factual reasoning or thought experiments are fundamental to the way we humans think about the world.
Re: A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
#9Recent appearance on Sam Harris podcast, I quite enjoyed it.... https://samharris.org/podcasts/164-cause-effect/ #164 - Cause & Effect - A Conversation with Judea Pearl August 5, 2019 In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Judea Pearl about his work on the mathematics of causality and artificial intelligence. They discuss how science has generally failed to understand causation, different…
I would strongly recommended this podcast.
Re: A Philosopher Reviews Judea Pearl's “The Book of Why”
#10I like the review, but the criticism of distinguishing causality from counterfactual reasoning feels weak to me. Do we actually care about the counterfactual reasoning most? Of course. But establishing causality as its own thing before counterfactuals is necessary in the way that Pearl has structured his math. And even the grammar of human languages enforces this separation of concepts. Do you need causality to even…
I am not sure how to define "cause" without introducing counterfactuals. "This happened because I did that" seems to imply "Had I not done that, this would not have happened" -- a counterfactual.
Maybe this is a problem with terminology then; because these definitions are clearly distinct and have entirely separate methods when you formalize them in math.
Perhaps we should call Pearl's Rung 3 counterfactuals "subjunctive" or something entirely else to distinguish the concepts and methods of Rung 2 and Rung 3. But these rungs are extremely different in formulations and models, and are clearly distinct. If you want to call rung 2 "simple counterfactuals," well I'm not super into that sort of debate as long as we all agree to the meaning of the terms. And if philosophy finds the distinction between Pearl's Rung 2 and Rung 3 difficult to accept, then it may also mean that philosophy has not yet discovered what Pearl has formulated.