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Well from my point of view when I read the link, I see (with a little bit of characterization) two academics, one of them points at an issue on the standard sta

Well from my point of view when I read the link, I see (with a little bit of characterization) two academics, one of them points at an issue on the standard statistical approach and tools, provides a reproduceable way to showcase that answer, and the other one answers “not interesting - i’ll go now to do real work”. And I found that avoidance of a discussion of a shared example disheartening. And Pearl isnt just complaining - the provided an alternative. So it seems that one side identified a problem, curated examples, delivered a solution, and now the other side doesnt care about the problem - and causality is not a trivial problem. As academic discussion, not a business meeting, to me thats subpar. That’s only my view from the outside, it may well be the case that it is wrong and I just need to review more in depth Pearl to see that he does not bring anything useful.

bachmeier 8y ago
They've been debating this for many years, and Gelman is a coauthor and student of Rubin, who has been debating with Pearl for decades. Gelman is saying he doesn't want to debate the same issues yet again. The primary message of Pearl is "all other methods are trash and all empirical work done using those methods is trash." My interpretation of the post is that Gelman is arguing other methods are not trash. I probably agree more with Pearl than Gelman on the details, but Pearl's approach is just not appropriate for an academic setting.
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  What they are really fighting about is who gets to reference colloquial notions of causality when discussing their work. I don't think it's fair to say that Pearl treats the rest of stats as trash, but he is saying that they are misleading folks by describing their inference as evidence of cause and effect - which is about as bad for most academics and especially for the Rubin crew who have often policed integrity of other inference regimes (like less rigorous ML). Debating who gets to use which words is a great way to make sure your debate only matters to other academics. I'd love to see the causality camp make their point by unlocking some great new applied results instead!
- srean 8y ago
  Refusing to provide a demonstration of the statistical technique on a toy example constructed for pedagogic purpose, hardly constitutes as a "debate". I would file that under: using a lot of words to avoid answering a direct and fundamental question

bachmeier 8y ago

They've been debating this for many years, and Gelman is a coauthor and student of Rubin, who has been debating with Pearl for decades. Gelman is saying he doesn't want to debate the same issues yet again. The primary message of Pearl is "all other methods are trash and all empirical work done using those methods is trash." My interpretation of the post is that Gelman is arguing other methods are not trash. I probably agree more with Pearl than Gelman on the details, but Pearl's approach is just not appropriate for an academic setting.

evrydayhustling 8y ago
What they are really fighting about is who gets to reference colloquial notions of causality when discussing their work. I don't think it's fair to say that Pearl treats the rest of stats as trash, but he is saying that they are misleading folks by describing their inference as evidence of cause and effect - which is about as bad for most academics and especially for the Rubin crew who have often policed integrity of other inference regimes (like less rigorous ML). Debating who gets to use which words is a great way to make sure your debate only matters to other academics. I'd love to see the causality camp make their point by unlocking some great new applied results instead!
srean 8y ago
Refusing to provide a demonstration of the statistical technique on a toy example constructed for pedagogic purpose, hardly constitutes as a "debate". I would file that under: using a lot of words to avoid answering a direct and fundamental question