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Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: Some statisticians have long disparaged the very idea of causation.
Chapter 3: When causality is ignored, data by itself can easily mislead us.
Chapter 4: The ladder’s first rung focuses on association and basic probability.
Chapter 5: The ladder’s second rung is intervention, used in daily life and research.
Chapter 6: The top rung of the ladder is about understanding counterfactuals.
Chapter 7: To establish causality, it’s crucial to control for confounders.
Chapter 8: Correctly identifying mediators is often key to true causality.
Chapter 9: Mathematical formulas can encode causal relations as powerful algorithms.
Description
The Book of Why (2018) introduces basic concepts of statistical methods of argumentation and makes the case for a mathematical model of causation. For decades, the mantra “correlation does not imply causation” has been hammered home by statisticians. The result has been stagnation in many forms of research, and this book aims to push back against this trend.
Who Should Listen
- Followers of national news and government reports
- Social scientists reliant on big data
- Humanities students looking to break with dominant paradigms