Practical advice gives you a suggestion on what to do that will be good in some contexts, and bad in others. A causal model allows you to still still make accurate predictions in multiple unforeseen contexts, allows counterfactual modeling and thereby the modeling of interventions. There's a world of difference between the two. And I find a world of difference between people who think in terms of one or the other.
Today's post, Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories was originally published on 25 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Go Forth and Create the Art, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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