Rationality Quotes: April 2011

benelliott

You all know the rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

You all know the rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

...that was written by a Less Wrong reader. Or if not, someone who independently reinvented things to well past the point where I want to talk to them. Do you know the author?

4thomblake15y

Seriously, she seems pretty awesome. link to Johns Hopkins profile

7Tyrrell_McAllister15y

Hasn't using DAGs to talk about causality long been a staple of the philosophy and computer science of causation? The logical positivist philosopher Hans Reichenbach used directed acyclic graphs to depict causal relationships between events in his book The Direction of Time (1956). (See, e.g., p. 37.) A little searching online also turned up this 1977 article in Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. From p. 72: [...] That article came out around the time of Pearl's first papers, and it doesn't cite him. Had his ideas already reached that level of saturation? ETA: I've looked a little more closely at the 1977 paper, which is entitled "Problems in the Design of Knowledge Bases for Medical Consultation". It appears to completely lack the idea of performing surgery on the DAGs, though I may have missed something. Here is a longer quote from the paper (p. 72): [...] So, when it comes to demystifying causation, there is still a long distance from merely using DAGs to using DAGs in the particularly insightful way that Pearl does.