· 2018
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
- 684citations
- 2018year
Short summary
Judea Pearl's work on causality has revolutionized scientific inquiry, moving beyond mere correlation to enable claims about what causes what.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Twentieth-century science largely avoided claiming causation, focusing on correlation.
- Judea Pearl's work on causality represents a major scientific revolution.
- This new science allows for direct investigation of cause-and-effect relationships.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
"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"...
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2018 · DOI ↗
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Field: History and Philosophy of Science
History and Philosophy of ScienceArts and Humanities