Curated. I am excited about many more distillations and expositions of relevant math on the Alignment Forum. There are a lot of things I like about this post as a distillation:
Exercises throughout. They felt like they were simple enough that they helped me internalise definitions without disrupting the flow of reading.
Pictures! This post made me start thinking of finite factorisations as hyperrectangles, and histories as dimensions that a property does not extend fully along.
Clear links from Finite Factored Sets to Pearl. I think these are roughly the same links made in the original, but they felt clearer and more orienting here.
Highlighting which of Scott’s results are the “main” results (even more than the “Fundamental Theorem” name already did).
Magdalena Wache’s engagement in the comments.
I do think the pictures became less helpful to me towards the end, and I thus have worse intuitions about the causal inference part. I’m also not sure about the emphasis of this post on causal rather than temporal inference. But I still love the post overall.
Curated. I am excited about many more distillations and expositions of relevant math on the Alignment Forum. There are a lot of things I like about this post as a distillation:
Exercises throughout. They felt like they were simple enough that they helped me internalise definitions without disrupting the flow of reading.
Pictures! This post made me start thinking of finite factorisations as hyperrectangles, and histories as dimensions that a property does not extend fully along.
Clear links from Finite Factored Sets to Pearl. I think these are roughly the same links made in the original, but they felt clearer and more orienting here.
Highlighting which of Scott’s results are the “main” results (even more than the “Fundamental Theorem” name already did).
Magdalena Wache’s engagement in the comments.
I do think the pictures became less helpful to me towards the end, and I thus have worse intuitions about the causal inference part. I’m also not sure about the emphasis of this post on causal rather than temporal inference. But I still love the post overall.
(for those wondering: kave has been a LWer for many years and works full-time with the lightcone team)