The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

How the study of causality revolutionized science and the world

"Correlation does not imply causation." This mantra has been invoked by scientists for decades, and has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed causality--the study of cause and effect--on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.

Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science at UCLA and winner of the 2011 Turing Award and the author of three classic technical books on causality. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Dana Mackenzie is an award-winning science writer and the author of The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

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