> we learn these inferences by acting on the world and observing the results, and arguably they are simply not learnable by pure observation alone. Also crucia

> we learn these inferences by acting on the world and observing the results, and arguably they are simply not learnable by pure observation alone. Also crucially, we learn these inferences by acting on the world and knowing something about why we acted. "I was playing with it" is a conditional independence statement that we use all the time while learning how things work, we just usually don't use the mathy language to describe it. We're running randomized controlled trials constantly, but implicitly. Coincidentally, it's a common anecdote that people who seem to learn things quickly and deeply have this curiosity and will play with a thing/twiddle the knobs while they're learning how it works. When you're playing a video game and someone says "hang on, let me figure out the controls for a sec" they're changing the conditional independence structure of their observations and running an RCT.