Pearl himself says that he has discovered two laws, and once you have them, you can fire him, because the rest is just algebra! And he calls it a calculus of counterfactuals, just like Newton and Bayes and everyone did. Fascinating.
I couldn’t find anything on what problems Pearl was thinking about when he came up with his calculus of counterfactuals. Like, was he personally trying to analyze clinical trials? Was he a mathematician who was friends with people doing large experiments and thought the math was interesting? I want to know what part of the world he was in contact with when developing it.
I don’t know much about the history, but the fact that Pearl was a computer scientist must surely have mattered a lot. His causality math essentially treats the laws of physics as being a “symbolic” program, which given some input generates the resulting variables of the world.
I don’t know much about the history, but the fact that Pearl was a computer scientist must surely have mattered a lot. His causality math essentially treats the laws of physics as being a “symbolic” program, which given some input generates the resulting variables of the world.