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A common misconception, but you'd have to read quite a bit of Judea Pearl to understand how certain patterns of conditional statistical independence do allow us
by Eliezer 17y ago
A common misconception, but you'd have to read quite a bit of Judea Pearl to understand how certain patterns of conditional statistical independence do allow us to declare causation.
See this page for a start:
http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/home.htm http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/home.htm
Or the opening paragraphs of this:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/qr/timeless_causality/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qr/timeless_causality/
- DaniFong 17y agoThank you for your links, and writing the article that you've written. I've tried to understand it; though in honesty skimming it more than reading it, and I haven't given it the fresh thought that it likely requires. But. How can one declare causation if one isn't even sure of one's senses? One's observations? One's data? How can we avoid the possibility of an 'evil daemon' of Cartesian philosophy: who is "as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort to misleading me." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_daemon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_daemon Sure, certain patterns patterns of our observations will nudge us one way or the other towards a higher probability of assigning some, possibly specific, causal link. But can we ever be sure of it? This is the sense in which I mean that nothing 'implies' causation. Perhaps it is better to say that some things merely suggest it.
- Eliezer 17y agoIn precisely the same sense, nothing implies anything. So why single out causality?
- DaniFong 17y agoMainly because people so commonly dismiss a study by stating that 'correlation doesn't imply causation,' while going about their lives with their own ideas and biases based on anecdotal evidence just the same. It's the tool of a common course of visible hypocrisy. Maybe it's just a personal thing.