I’ve thought a good amount about Finite Factored Sets in the past year or two, but I do sure keep going back to thinking about the world primarily in the form of Pearlian causal influence diagrams, and I am not really sure why.
I do think this one line by Scott at the top gave me at least one pointer towards what was happening:
but I’m trained as a combinatorialist, so I’m giving a combinatorics talk upfront.
In the space of mathematical affinities, combinatorics is among the branches of math I feel most averse to, and I think that explains a good part of the problem I have with the current Finite Factored Sets explanation. I quite liked Paul’s top comment, which characterized FFS as more of a generalization of Pearlian causality in a way that gave me a bit more of an in, but I do wish this sequence and talk would generally do that more, and maybe phrase things in a way that my graph-shaped, linear-algebra-shaped brain can more easily understand.
I’ve thought a good amount about Finite Factored Sets in the past year or two, but I do sure keep going back to thinking about the world primarily in the form of Pearlian causal influence diagrams, and I am not really sure why.
I do think this one line by Scott at the top gave me at least one pointer towards what was happening:
In the space of mathematical affinities, combinatorics is among the branches of math I feel most averse to, and I think that explains a good part of the problem I have with the current Finite Factored Sets explanation. I quite liked Paul’s top comment, which characterized FFS as more of a generalization of Pearlian causality in a way that gave me a bit more of an in, but I do wish this sequence and talk would generally do that more, and maybe phrase things in a way that my graph-shaped, linear-algebra-shaped brain can more easily understand.
This underrated post is pretty good at explaining how to translate between FFSs and DAGs.