Wherefore Art Thou?
Book Review: Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, "The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect", Penguin Books, 2019. If you have read the LessWrong Sequences , you know that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a big fan of Judea Pearl -- he references Pearl in this , this , and this article among others. Someone even made this picture of Eliezer, holding Judea Pearl's book Causality : If you're unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, let's just say that Pearl's work can be used to understand how people irrationally update their beliefs, and what they should do instead. His book on Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems is referenced by folks like MIRI in the context of getting AI to learn from probabilistic models of the world. He has won the Turing Award, the most prestigious in computer science. Unfortunately, he is also known as the father of Daniel Pearl , a journalist who was killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. Judea Pearl's la...