So the author quotes Judea Pearl, whose causal calculus led to PGMs playing a critical in computer science and science as a whole, and somehow uses that to supp

So the author quotes Judea Pearl, whose causal calculus led to PGMs playing a critical in computer science and science as a whole, and somehow uses that to support the idea that probability theory is useless? That is absurd and out of context. Take a look at Kaldi or any state of the art platform for sound to speech and NLP analysis, or take a look at deep belief machines/networks. They all roughly extend probabilistic graphical models with deep architectures and some nonlinearity to do what couldn't be done before. (See also the Neural Hawkes Process [https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09328 https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09328].) The article seems to primarily be about promoting his book instead of having a cohesive argument. Yes, nonlinearity matters, but I'm not remotely convinced that tossing probability is a good thing.