The Book of Why
The New Science of Cause and Effect

Failed revolution In an old joke, an engineer, a physicist and an economist are marooned on a desert island with canned food. They are trying to figure out the best way to open the cans, and while the engineer and the physicist propose various mechanical schemes to get the job done, the economist say......more

Well, I am not an expert on statistics, so maybe I'm missing something important, but I really don't understand all the negative criticism that I see in other reviews of this book. Pearl, who has spent a long career working in an area which spans statistical reasoning, philosophy and AI, set himself......more

I've never met Pearl, but having read a couple of his books, I'm pretty sure he's an asshole. His anger and bitterness comes through very clearly in his book — he spends as much space naming and vilifying his professional enemies, both living and dead, as he does explaining his work. This is a real......more

There are great ideas in this book. I'm not an expert on causality or statistics, but I found the idea of modeling causality using a directed graph, and using that graph as a tool for both a) determining valid controls in experimental data and b) performing counterfactual reasoning to be thoughtful......more

If I've earned a penny every time I heard the sentence "correlation is not causation", I'd be a richer man by now, and that'd probably be a causal relationship. If correlation is not causation, then what is causation? I, like many others, asked this question since I took my first undergraduate course......more