Pearl – The Book of Why
Book page: pearl-book-why
From: Quotes batch 18
Concept
“The Ladder of Causation consists of three levels: Association (seeing), Intervention (doing), and Counterfactuals (imagining).” (p. 28)
Behavior
“Human behavior is not just a response to stimuli; it is an enactment of a causal model we have built of the world.” (p. 45)
Game Theory
“To understand the effect of a strategy, we must ask the counterfactual: what would have happened if we had made a different move?” (p. 282)
Cognition
“Our brains are not sophisticated calculators; they are causal-inference engines designed to find ‘why’ before ‘how’.” (p. 25)
Memory
“Data is the memory of past associations, but it cannot tell us about cause and effect unless we bring a model to it.” (p. 31)