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Judea Pearl Profile picture
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13 Jan, 3 tweets, 2 min read
You hit it on the nail: Statistics 101 book from the future. This is precisely what I had in mind inwriting #Bookofwhy. So, here is an even simpler, more compelling example of why combining observational and experimental data should inform us about individuals behavior:
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It's called "The Curse of Free-will and the Paradox of Inevitable Regret" ucla.in/2N6x36Q.
Here, the reason that free choice turns out disastrous is familiar to all of us: Laziness. We also understand why the consequence of this tempting quality of human nature
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can only be revealed by comparing observational and experimental data. The dictatorial nature of the latter proves its virtue by comparing the average performance of the oppressed to that of the un-oppressed (or un-disciplined). Any one study, alone, cannot do it.
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More from @yudapearl

Judea Pearl Profile picture
27 Dec 21
As the year draws to a close, many are looking back on the moments from 2021 that gave them hope and encouragement. Kenneth Markus lists his 10 Most Inspiring Moments in the fight against #antisemitism: jewishjournal.com/commentary/opi…
I would like to add another, missed by
1/5
the media, suppressed by our leaders, and hush-hushed by university administrators. Yes, I'm coming back to the USC scandal, and the 65 of its top professors who scored a huge victory through this letter: usc-faaz-12-2021.org. Here they defined in effect a new
2/5
minority group on US campuses: Identity Zionism, defined not by victimhood and
need of protection, but by its inspiring nation-building experience and ideas, its academic excellence, and its unique contributions to campus life. To appreciate the magnitude of the victory,
3/5
Read 5 tweets
Judea Pearl Profile picture
4 Dec 21
Is it dumbness or deliberate blindness that prevents USC officials from listening to their students and faculty? Death threats were disseminated against Zionists. Incriminating statements were made against the very being of Israel. 60 distinguished professors are pleading 1/4
with USC leadership to explicitly de-criminalize Zionist and Israeli identities [quoting from their Letter]:
"Most importantly, Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli students, as well as those who support the right of the State of Israel to exist need to hear from our leaders that 2/4
they are welcome on our campus." Yet, stunningly, in their response, USC leaders blatantly and meticulously refrain from spelling out the words "Zionist" and "Israel", leaving thousands of students, faculty, staff, potential students, parents of USC students, and the
3/4
Read 4 tweets
Judea Pearl Profile picture
27 Nov 21
A new book "Causation in Science, by Yemima Ben-Menahem makes the point that, in ordinary scientific practice, conservation constraints often serve as explanations. For example: "Why did the roller coaster slow down"? "Because energy must be conserved"
watermark.silverchair.com/fzab078.pdf?to…
1/4
To include such constraints as "causal explanations" Ben-Menachem advocates abandoning the paradigm that causation is a relation between events, or variables. I hesitate! Considering the fact that conversational utterances are in themselves products of language constraints, 2/4
they are hardly in a position to illuminate the nature of causation. To elaborate, all scientific languages, until 1920, were wedded to the symmetric algebraic equality "=", lacking notation for the assignment operator ":=", with which causal asymmetries can be expressed.
3/4
Read 4 tweets
Judea Pearl Profile picture
11 Nov 21
1/5 Finding a do-operator in a @DeepMind article is a tectonic progress that deserves welcoming blessing. The "delusions" treated in this article are endemic of "Evidential Decision Theory" which Causality (ch 4.1.1 ucla.in/38bmhnO)
summarizes in a mnemonic limerick:
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- Whatever evidence an act might provide
- On what could have caused the act,
- Should never be used to help one decide
- On whether to choose that same act.
Typical real life ramifications of these delusions are:
(1) patients should avoid going to the doctor “to reduce the
3/5
 probability that one is seriously ill”
(2) workers should never hurry to work, to reduce the probability of having overslept, and more.
The deployment of the do-operator eliminates these "delusions" and has led to the "sequential backdoor criterion" of Sec. 4.4.3.
Read 5 tweets
Judea Pearl Profile picture
1 Nov 21
1/ To appreciate what I mean by "assumptions whose plausibility you cannot judge" I often ask readers to examine how Imbens and Rubin (2015) define "unconfoundedness", the key concept needed for all causal inference. Quoting from their page 479, we find (fasten your seat belts):
2/: First,"the conditional distribution of the outcome under the control treatment, Y i (0), given receipt of the active treatment and given covariates, is identical to its distribution conditional on receipt of the control treatment and conditional on covariates, and second,
3/ that, analogously, the conditional distribution of the outcome under the active treatment, Y i (1), given receipt of the control treatment and conditional
on covariates, is identical to its distribution given receipt of the active treatment and conditional on covariates." No!
Read 4 tweets
Judea Pearl Profile picture
19 Oct 21
1/ I'm compelled to retweet this thread because so often I see well-intentioned people assuming that a "happy ever after" 1-state solution is inevitable because Palestinian's rejection of Jewish self determination (in ANY borders) is so total and deeply entrenched that any other
2/ arrangement amounts to endless blood shed. As one born in Israel and tuned daily to the country's pulse, let me mention another factor which is often ignored in conversations about the 1-state fantasy. Israelis resistance to a 1-state solution is at least as total and deeply
3/ entrenched as the Palestinians' rejection of Zionism. For Israelis, the idea of relinquishing Statehood (i.e., right to self defense and border control) towers as a collective suicide, against which people are willing to fight to the last soul (barring a few ultra orthodox
Read 5 tweets

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