I operate within the interventionist school of causality, whereby a causal effect has something to do with how interventions affect outcome variables. This is of course not the only formalization of causality, there are many many others. However, this particular one has been very influential, almost universally adopted among the empirical sciences, corresponds very closely to people’s causal intuitions in many important respects (and has the mathematical machinery to move far beyond when intuitions fail), and has a number of other nice advantages I don’t have the space to get into here (for example it helped to completely crack open the “what’s the dimension of a hidden variable DAG” problem).
One consequence of the conceptual success of the interventionist school is that there is now a long list of properties we think a formalization of causality has to satisfy (that were first figured out within the interventionist framework). So we can now rule out bad formalizations of causality fairly easily.
I think getting into the interventionist school is too long for even a top level post, let alone a response post buried many levels deep in a thread. If you are interested, you can read a book about it (Pearl’s book for example), or some papers.
Prediction algorithms, as used in ML today, completely fail on interventionist causal problems, which correspond, loosely speaking, to trying to figure out the effect of a randomized trial from observational data. I am not trying to give them a hard time about it, because that’s not what the emphasis in ML is, which is perfectly fine!
You can think of this problem as just another type of “prediction problem,” but this word usage simply does not conform to what people in ML mean by “prediction.” There is an entirely different theory, etc.
I operate within the interventionist school of causality, whereby a causal effect has something to do with how interventions affect outcome variables. This is of course not the only formalization of causality, there are many many others. However, this particular one has been very influential, almost universally adopted among the empirical sciences, corresponds very closely to people’s causal intuitions in many important respects (and has the mathematical machinery to move far beyond when intuitions fail), and has a number of other nice advantages I don’t have the space to get into here (for example it helped to completely crack open the “what’s the dimension of a hidden variable DAG” problem).
One consequence of the conceptual success of the interventionist school is that there is now a long list of properties we think a formalization of causality has to satisfy (that were first figured out within the interventionist framework). So we can now rule out bad formalizations of causality fairly easily.
I think getting into the interventionist school is too long for even a top level post, let alone a response post buried many levels deep in a thread. If you are interested, you can read a book about it (Pearl’s book for example), or some papers.
Prediction algorithms, as used in ML today, completely fail on interventionist causal problems, which correspond, loosely speaking, to trying to figure out the effect of a randomized trial from observational data. I am not trying to give them a hard time about it, because that’s not what the emphasis in ML is, which is perfectly fine!
You can think of this problem as just another type of “prediction problem,” but this word usage simply does not conform to what people in ML mean by “prediction.” There is an entirely different theory, etc.