In a former role working on software control systems for internet-scale bidding stuff, we’d often talk in terms of confounders, upstream/downstream, causal terms, etc. when developing and tuning system improvements. Pretty rare to actually draw a causal diagram (a few times?) or crack out do-calculus (never?) and I don’t know if everyone had read Pearl (probably not?) but at least passing fluency with the concepts was a big help.
I saw other teams (us too) fail or waste effort confused when they missed things that with a better appreciation for causal structure they’d have spotted.
My guess is this is a similar story for some technologists, and likely in medicine and other experimental fields, at least some of the time.
In a former role working on software control systems for internet-scale bidding stuff, we’d often talk in terms of confounders, upstream/downstream, causal terms, etc. when developing and tuning system improvements. Pretty rare to actually draw a causal diagram (a few times?) or crack out do-calculus (never?) and I don’t know if everyone had read Pearl (probably not?) but at least passing fluency with the concepts was a big help.
I saw other teams (us too) fail or waste effort confused when they missed things that with a better appreciation for causal structure they’d have spotted.
My guess is this is a similar story for some technologists, and likely in medicine and other experimental fields, at least some of the time.