196 | Judea Pearl on Cause and Effect

To say that event  A  causes event  B  is to not only make a claim about our actual world, but about other possible worlds — in worlds where  A  didn’t happen but everything else was the same,  B  would not have happened. This leads to an obvious difficulty if we want to infer causes from sets of data — we generally only have data about the actual world. Happily, there are ways around this difficulty, and the study of causal relations is of central importance in modern social science and artificial intelligence research. Judea Pearl has been the leader of the “causal revolution,” and we talk about what that means and what questions remain unanswered. Support Mindscape on  Patreon . Judea Pearl received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He is cu