eurg comments on Causal Diagrams and Causal Models - Less Wrong

61 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2012 09:49PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (274)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: eurg 20 October 2012 10:55:55PM 1 point [-]

Is this another variation of the theme that one needs to assume the possibility of inductive reasoning to make an argument for it (or also assume Occam's Razor to argue for it)? Also, the specific example he gave seems to me like an instance of "given very skewed data, the best guesses are still wrong" (there was sometime a variation of that here, regarding bets and opponents who have superior information). Or are you thinking of something for subtle?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 31 October 2012 06:24:10PM *  2 points [-]

Even if you assume that we can do induction (and assume faithfulness!), conditional independence tests simply do not select among causal models. They select among statistical models, because conditional independences are properties of joint distributions (statistical, rather than causal objects). Linking those joint distributions with something causal relies on causal assumptions.

I think the biggest lesson to learn from Pearl's book is to keep statistical and causal notions separate.

Comment author: eurg 05 November 2012 02:21:20PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for clarifying!