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

Description

A pioneer of artificial intelligence shows how the study of causality revolutionized science and the world 'Correlation does not imply causation.' This mantra was invoked by scientists for decades in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer and carbon dioxide and global warming. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by world-renowned computer scientist Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis. Now, Pearl and science journalist Dana Mackenzie explain causal thinking to general readers for the first time, showing how it allows us to explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as Pearl's discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we can think better.

Judea Pearl (Author) Judea Pearl is a world-renowned Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, known for his world-leading work in AI and the development of Bayesian networks, as well as his theory of causal and counterfactual inference. In 2011, he won the most prestigious award in computer science, the Alan Turing Award. He has also received the Rumelhart Prize (Cognitive Science Society), the Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) and the Lakatos Award (London School of Economics), and he is the founder and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. Dana Mackenzie, a Ph.D. mathematician turned science writer, has written for such magazines as Science, New Scientist, and Discover.

Have you ever wondered about the puzzles of correlation and causation? This wonderful book has illuminating answers and it is fun to read -- Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize * author of Thinking, Fast and Slow * If causation is not correlation, then what is it? Thanks to Judea Pearl's epoch-making research, we now have a precise answer to this question. If you want to understand how the world works, this engrossing and delightful book is the place to start -- Pedro Domingos, professor of computer science, University of Washington * author of The Master Algorithm * Judea Pearl has been the heart and soul of a revolution in artificial intelligence and in computer science more broadly -- Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and Director, Microsoft Research Labs Pearl's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence ... and they have redefined the term 'thinking machine' -- Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc. Modern applications of AI, such as robotics, self-driving cars, speech recognition, and machine translation deal with uncertainty. Pearl has been instrumental in supplying the rationale and much valuable technology that allow these applications to flourish -- Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research, Google, Inc.