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.

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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.


Jaksot(417)

31 | Brian Greene on the Multiverse, Inflation, and the String Theory Landscape

31 | Brian Greene on the Multiverse, Inflation, and the String Theory Landscape

String theory was originally proposed as a relatively modest attempt to explain some features of strongly-interacting particles, but before too long developed into an ambitious attempt to unite all th...

28 Tammi 20191h 11min

30 | Derek Leben on Ethics for Robots and Artificial Intelligences

30 | Derek Leben on Ethics for Robots and Artificial Intelligences

It's hardly news that computers are exerting ever more influence over our lives. And we're beginning to see the first glimmers of some kind of artificial intelligence: computer programs have become mu...

21 Tammi 20191h 28min

29 | Raychelle Burks on the Chemistry of Murder

29 | Raychelle Burks on the Chemistry of Murder

Sometimes science is asking esoteric questions about the fundamental nature of reality. Other times, it just wants to solve a murder. Today's guest, Raychelle Burks, is an analytical chemist at St. Ed...

14 Tammi 20191h 15min

28 | Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe

28 | Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe

Sir Roger Penrose has had a remarkable life. He has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of general relativity, perhaps more than anyone since Einstein himself -- Penrose diagrams, sing...

7 Tammi 20191h 35min

Holiday Message 2018

Holiday Message 2018

There won't be any regular episodes of Mindscape this week or next, as we take a holiday break. Regular service will resume on Monday January 7, 2019. In the meantime, here is a special Holiday Messag...

24 Joulu 201844min

27 | Janna Levin on Black Holes, Chaos, and the Narrative of Science

27 | Janna Levin on Black Holes, Chaos, and the Narrative of Science

It's a big universe out there, full of an astonishing variety of questions and puzzles. Today's guest, Janna Levin, is a physicist who has delved into some of the trippiest aspects of cosmology and gr...

17 Joulu 20181h 8min

26 | Ge Wang on Artful Design, Computers, and Music

26 | Ge Wang on Artful Design, Computers, and Music

Everywhere around us are things that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in cars. But these things don't only serve functions, they also come in particular forms, which may be emo...

10 Joulu 20181h 10min

25 | David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation

25 | David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation

The "Easy Problems" of consciousness have to do with how the brain takes in information, thinks about it, and turns it into action. The "Hard Problem," on the other hand, is the task of explaining our...

3 Joulu 20181h 22min

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