Lit Review - Dawid (2008) Beware of the DAG!

The author looks at the current causal inference/discovery methods that Pearl and Sprite from a philosophical perspective.

One thing quite interesting that the author mentioned is the difference between “seeing” and “doing” that Pearl brought up in his book Causality. “Seeing” and “doing” are definitely different, but from a philosphical standpoint, you don’t know what a system will behave until you “do” something about it, and infering the effects of “doing” from obversational “seeing” is questionable. Pearl’s approach trying to infer “doing” from “seeing” might need more justification, or strong assumptions has to be made.

The author also mentioned that even though causal discovery algorithms developed to automized the process of discovering causal connections, they are not automatic due to the fact that assumptions and results has to be clearly justified using domain knowledge.

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