196 | Judea Pearl on Cause and Effect

To say that event A causes event B is to not only make a claim about our actual world, but about other possible worlds — in worlds where A didn't happen but everything else was the same, B would not have happened. This leads to an obvious difficulty if we want to infer causes from sets of data — we generally only have data about the actual world. Happily, there are ways around this difficulty, and the study of causal relations is of central importance in modern social science and artificial intelligence research. Judea Pearl has been the leader of the "causal revolution," and we talk about what that means and what questions remain unanswered.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Judea Pearl received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He is currently a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Causal Inference. Among his awards are the Lakatos Award in the philosophy of science, The Allen Newell Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, the ACM Turing Award, and the Grenander Prize from the American Mathematical Society. He is the co-author (with Dana MacKenzie) of The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect.


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362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, and use less infrastructure per person. Indeed, the relations...

27 Heinä 1h 20min

361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together

361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together

One of the characteristics of life is that living organisms gather information and put it to use. Even one of the simplest lifeforms, bacteria, are able to sense features of their surroundings and alt...

20 Heinä 1h 15min

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026

Welcome to the July 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...

13 Heinä 4h 3min

360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass

360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass

Modern life has, in many ways, removed us from the environments in which our ancestors lived and adapted. Not only do we spend time looking at screens, but we spend time indoors, or outdoors but in ur...

6 Heinä 1h 29min

359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy

359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy

The cosmological constant, as discussed last episode, provides a perfectly good (thus far) explanation for why we observe the universe to be accelerating. But it might not be the right explanation, an...

29 Kesä 1h 56min

358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant

358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant

The most surprising discovery in fundamental physics during my career as a scientist was undoubtedly the acceleration of the universe, announced in 1998. The most straightforward explanation for these...

22 Kesä 1h 59min

357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics

357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics

Messenger RNA (mRNA) plays a literally central role in the functioning of life as we know it, shuttling information back and forth between the DNA where it is stored to the ribosome where it is used t...

15 Kesä 1h 19min

356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity

356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity

All ideas have a history, no matter how inevitable and well-entrenched they may seem to us today. The later Enlightenment was a heady time when people were exploring new conceptions of nature, humanit...

8 Kesä 1h 17min

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