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The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

Judea Pearl

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THE WORD OF MOUTH

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Original Hacker News comments, in the readers’ own words.

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Judea Pearl's The Book of Why. Basically Pearl argues that classical statistics completely ignored the concept of causality so far and introduces a complete framework to bring causal inference into statistical/data analysis. The framework is based on graphs and asks for causal hypotheses (like econometricians would do with instrumental variables) and allows to compute/quantify causal effects. Anyone working with data should probably read this book. The fact that Pearl brought in a professional math/science writer as co-author is a huge boost to the main ideas accessibility and make for a nice albeit deep summer read.