It goes against the spirit of "15 words" to insist on strict truth.

I would suggest that it goes against the spirit of Judea Pearl's Causality to say things that are false or misleading.

Do note that I actually support the example, despite the problems. I expect that the surrounding context in Pearl's work more than adequately explains the relevant details. What I would object to is any attempt to suppress discussion of the limitations of such claims---so if it was the case that the "spirit of '15 words'" discourages discussion and clarification then I would reject it as inappropriate on this site.

Hehe...here's a controversial one.

The process and the consequences of fighting oppressive heirarchies are worse the heirarchies themselves - my take on Mencius Moldbug.

I don't really agree. But I've tried pretty hard to wrap my head around his ideology (he's incredibly long winded) and this is what I got from it. If I had to add a second sentence, it would be this:

"Progressive culture seduces intellectual elites and redirects their power to destructive, unreflective, self-righteous reformation."

..."This reformation inevitably strengthens the Progressive ideology and institutions, resulting in an invisible feedback cycle of power".

If there are any actual formalists reading this thread, I'd like to see one of them condense the main point into a supershort string like this, because it's really long...

Neat. It would be nice to describe this site in a dozen or so words and put this description on the front page.

I feel this quote belongs in this thread.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L.Mencken

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Without the [view of life from gene perspective] there is no particular reason why an organism should 'care' about its reproductive success and that of its relatives, rather than, for instance, its own longevity

Belongs in Discussion IMO

To the mathematicians, correlation is a statement about random variables, and not the same as empirical correlation (which is a statement about samples, and might be spurious).

Of course the world isn't made of random variables, but only in the same sense that the world isn't made of causal models. They are models, and "correlation" and "causation" are features of the model which don't exist in the real world. In a causal model, correlation implies causation (somewhere).

Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick:

Communicate one thing.

Judea Pearl, Causality:

If two things are correlated, there is causation. Either A causes B, B causes A, they have common cause, or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.

Edit: If two variables are correlated, there is causation. Either A causes B, B causes A, they have common cause, or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.