Judea Pearl

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Judea Pearl was the winner of the 2011 ACM Turing Award for "For fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning ".
Judea Pearl is the father of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan connected with Al-Qaeda and the International Islamic Front in 2002 for his American and Jewish heritage. Wikipedia (as of 2023-03-25)

More: Converse fallacy: If A then B does not mean If B then A

Probabilistic reasoning in intelligent systems

Causality

Here are some quotes from Judea Pearl relating to causal reasoning and counterfactual logic. (references to be added).

From his writings, Judea Pearl appears to be what might be called an "agnostic Jew" which might be defined as "a Jew who knows what the God he does not believe in requires of him".

Judea Pearl relates the following about causal reasoning.
In the beginning, as far as we can tell, causality was not problematic. The urge to ask WHY and the capacity to find causal explanations came very early in human development. The Bible, for example, tells us that just a few hours after tasting from the tree of knowledge, Adam is already an expert in causal arguments. When God asks: "Did you eat from that tree?" This is what Adam replies: "The woman whom you gave to be with me, She handed me the fruit from the tree; and I ate." Eve is just as skillful: "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

More: Declarative models

Judea Pearl continues about causal reasoning.
The thing to notice about this story is that God did not ask for explanation, only for the facts: It was Adam who felt the need to explain - the message is clear, causal explanation is a man-made concept. Another interesting point about the story: explanations are used exclusively for passing responsibilities. Indeed, for thousands of years explanations had no other function. Therefore, only Gods, people and animals could cause things to happen, not objects, events or physical processes.

English: since it happens that the earth becomes drenched when it has rained, if it is drenched, we think that it has rained, though this is not necessarily true. (Loeb#400, p. 31)

Greek: καὶ ἐπεὶ συμβαίνει τὴν γῆν ὕσαντος γίνεσθαι διάβροχον, κἂν ᾖ διάβροχος, ὑπολαμβάνομεν ὗσαι. Τὸ δ´ οὐκ ἀναγκαῖον. Sophistic Refutations [167a]

English: any more than it follows that a man who is hot must be in a fever because a man who is in a fever is hot. (Loeb#400, p. 31)

Greek: γέγονεν, ὥσπερ οὐδ´ εἰ ὁ πυρέττων θερμός, καὶ τὸν θερμὸν ἀνάγκη πυρέττειν. Sophistic Refutations [167a]

Judea Pearl uses the same example about the rain and wet ground in his work.

More: Converse fallacy: If A then B does not mean If B then A

The following is a traditional approach of frequentist statistical .

Create a hypothesis called the null hypothesis.
Gather arguments for or against the hypothesis. This often involves "cherry picking" of evidence.
Order the arguments based on how convincing they are. Hide arguments not favorable.
Use any deception techniques on the assumption that the "end justifies the means".

It has been shown (e.g.,, Judea Pearl, 1970's) that the frequentist statistical can show almost anything true and anything false as desired.

The Bayesian statistical approach, and the causation models developed by Pearl, fit more like a constraint-based logic system in a probabilistic fault-tolerant search for truth within constraints.

Details are left as a future topic.

More: The Christian Hedonism fallacy

The classical case demonstrating Simpson's paradox took place in 1975, when UC Berkeley was investigated for sex bias in graduate admission. In this study, overall data showed a higher rate of admission among male applicants, but, broken down by departments, data showed a slight bias in favor of admitting female applicants. Judea Pearl

The explanation is simple: female applicants tended to apply to more competitive departments than males, and in these departments, the rate of admission was low for both males and females. Judea Pearl

More: Simpson's paradox

For example, you might run a study and find that students who smoke get higher grades, however, if you adjust for AGE, the opposite is true in every AGE GROUP, namely, smoking predicts lower grades. If you further adjust for PARENT INCOME, you find that smoking predicts higher grades again, in every AGE-INCOME group, and so on. http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html (as of 1974)

More: Simpson's paradox