The Book of Why

Sociologists renamed path analysis as structural equation modeling (SEM), embraced diagrams, and used them extensively until 1970, when a computer package called LISREL automated the calculation of path coefficients (in some cases).

and should be the cornerstone of machine intelligence.

doing, entails predicting the effect(s) of deliberate alterations of the environment and choosing among these alterations to produce a desired outcome.

observable patterns or dependencies in the data.

The process of looking only at rows in the table where Smoke = 1 is called conditioning on a variable.

FIGURE 1.2. The Ladder of Causation, with representative organisms at each level. Most animals, as well as present-day learning machines, are on the first rung, learning from association. Tool users, such as early humans, are on the second rung if they act by planning and not merely by imitation. We can also use experiments to learn the effects of

expert systems, which organize human knowledge as a collection of specific and general facts, along with inference rules to connect them. For example: Socrates is a man (specific fact). All men are mortals (general fact). From this knowledge base we (or an intelligent machine) can derive the fact that Socrates is a mortal, using the universal rule

some queries may not be answerable under the current causal model,

But how do we decide which information to disregard,