Quotes from Judea Pearl

invoked only if it is absolutely needed for explaining some observed or derived phenomenon, e.g., finding your home burglarized and your alarm system silent.

I hope with this book to convince you that data are profoundly dumb. Data can tell you that the people who took a medicine recovered faster than those who did not take it, but they can't tell you why. Maybe those who took the medicine did so because they could afford it and would have recovered just as fast without it.

paradox is more than that: it should entail a conflict between two deeply held convictions.

Scientists should seek shielded mediators whenever they face incurable confounders.

With Bayesian networks, we had taught machines to think in shades of grey, and this was an important step toward humanlike thinking. But we still couldn't teach machines to understand causes and effects. We couldn't explain to a computer why turning the dial of a barometer won't cause rain.... Without the ability to envision alternate realities and contrast them with the currently existing reality, a machine...cannot answer the most basic question that makes us human: "Why?

T]he cultural shocks that emanate from new scientific findings are eventually settled by cultural realignments that accommodate those findings—not by concealment. A prerequisite for this realignment is that we sort out the science from the culture before opinions become inflamed.

overrate it in the sense that they often control for many more variables than they need to and even for variables that they should not