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Comment by dirtyaura | Hacker News Reader

Pearl's "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems" was one of the most lauded books during my time in the university. I remember when Pearl gave a talk about his upcoming book Causality, my professor said that it might become one of the most important math and philosophy books of our life time. I never read Causality, and it is now 16 years since the publication. Can anyone who follows the field comment how it is perceived today?

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Im not completely sold on his book being a textbook.

It is incredible bit of research, I agree, but it still has rough edges and should be treated as such, a work in progress. I do not think this book should be the bible of causality, and I think we're worse off for thinking it is.

Personally, I find the work of Richardson and Robins in Single World Intervention Graphs https://www.csss.washington.edu/Papers/wp128.pdf far more intuitive and compelling than Pearl's do-calculus. The notation is too slightly cleaner and it does away mostly with the unorthodox notation Pearl uses.

I would like to get an introduction to the main ideas in current causality research. Is Pearl's book still the best introduction, or would you recommend something else instead?

I think most people who study causal inference would say that Pearl's writing is seldom as clear as a person unfamiliar with his ideas would like it to be. These days, I suspect most people would benefit from starting with Morgan and Winship instead: https://www.amazon.com/Counterfactuals-Causal-Inference-Prin...

In addition to presenting Pearl's ideas more clearly than Pearl himself tends to do, Morgan and Winship also describe Rubin's work more fairly than Pearl does. (On the other hand, Rubin also tends to disparage Pearl's work more than is necessary.)

I'm 20 pages in. I'll eventually read it in full, but it is very math heavy and hard to digest. I am reading it at a very slow pace (a few pages per week) because that's the only way for me to assimilate the content.

My personal opinion is that it is a very good book, just a bit hard.

Read the last few paragraphs of TFA.

What's TFA?

The fine article

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