16 Quotes by Judea Pearl

You cannot answer a question that you cannot ask, and you cannot ask a question that you have no words for.

Deep learning has instead given us machines with truly impressive abilities but no intelligence. The difference is profound and lies in the absence of a model of reality.

If I could sum up the message of this book in one pithy phrase, it would be that you are smarter than your data. Data do not understand causes and effects; humans do.

Probabilities and the Logic of “Almost True.

Data can tell you that the people who took a medicine recovered faster than those who did not take it, but they can’t tell you why. Maybe those who took the medicine did so because they could afford it and would have recovered just as fast without it.

Where causation is concerned, a grain of wise subjectivity tells us more about the real world than any amount of objectivity.

Counterfactual reasoning, which deals with what-ifs, might strike some readers as unscientific. Indeed, empirical observation can never confirm or refute the answers to such questions.