CDR: Re: Risk and insurance

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Mon Oct 23 08:42:24 PDT 2000


At 2:50 PM +0300 10/23/00, Sampo A Syreeni wrote:
>On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, Tim May wrote:
>
>>The book I recommended a week or two ago, Judea Pearl's "Causality,"
>>is much more advanced in its mathematics. (But the math is important
>>if one is actually trying to construct the causality diagrams Pearl
>>is talking about.)
>
>Would it be too much to ask you to recant the main point made? It sounds
>pretty interesting...

I'll recount it, but not recant it.

Think of spacetime diagrams, a la the lightcones of Minkowski 
diagrams. Events A and B precede Event C.

The same kind of diagrams obviously apply in ordinary events, without 
regard to the speed of light. A directed acyclig graph (DAG) of 
various events, some in the "causal chain" leading to some Event C, 
some outside the causal chain.

Pearl addresses Bayesian networks in terms of DAGs and provides tools 
for analyzing when events actually "cause" other events. Of great 
interest for deciding when, for example, some drug test produces 
meaningful results, when some legal proof of causality is being 
challenged, etc.

Pearl doesn't produce some magical formula for separating causes from 
non-causes, just a bunch of theorems and corollaries which may be 
useful in policy analysis, experiment design, and just thinking about 
the world. I think of it as a kind of "network analysis," akin to 
tools for circuit analysis (like Kirchoff's Law, for example).

More discussion is of course available at Amazon or in search engines.


--Tim May
-- 
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon"             | black markets, collapse of governments.





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