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One of Science Friday's "Best Science Books of 2018"

"Illuminating... The Professor Pearl who emerges from the pages of The Book of Why brims with the joy of discovery and pride in his students and colleagues... [it] not only delivers a valuable lesson on the history of ideas but provides the conceptual tools needed to judge just what big data can and cannot deliver."―Jonathan A. Knee, New York Times

"Illuminating... The Professor Pearl who emerges from the pages of The Book of Why brims with the joy of discovery and pride in his students and colleagues... [it] not only delivers a valuable lesson on the history of ideas but provides the conceptual tools needed to judge just what big data can and cannot deliver."―New York Times

"Cause and effect is one of the most heavily debated, difficult-to-prove things in science and medicine. This book really gets you thinking about cause and effect as it applies to issues of our time, such as: How come cigarettes were around for years and we never showed they were causing cancer or heart disease? The authors goes through these cases like an interrogation, and it's just extraordinary."―Science Friday

"'Correlation is not causation.' That scientific refrain has had social consequences...Judea Pearl proposes a radical mathematical solution...now bearing fruit in biology, medicine, social science and AI."―Nature

"Lively and accessible...Pearl was one of the visionary leaders of the causal revolution, and The Book of Why is his crowning achievement."―Jewish Journal

"Anyone interested in probing connections between cause and effect, and their relevance for the future of AI, will find this a fascinating and provocative book. Highly recommended."―CHOICE


"Have you ever wondered about the puzzles of correlation and causation? This wonderful book has illuminating answers and it is fun to read."
―Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

"Pearl's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence... and they have redefined the term 'thinking machine.'"―Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.

"Judea Pearl has been the heart and soul of a revolution in artificial intelligence and in computer science more broadly."―Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and Director, Microsoft Research Labs

Chapter Page
Preface ix
Introduction Mind over Data 1
Chapter 1 The Ladder of Causation 23
Chapter 2 From Buccaneers to Guinea Pigs: The Genesis of Causal Inference 53
Chapter 3 From Evidence to Causes: Reverend Bayes Meets Mr
by Holmes 93
Chapter 4 Confounding and Deconfounding: Or, Slaying the Lurking Variable 135
Chapter 5 The Smoke-Filled Debate: Clearing the Air 167
Chapter 6 Paradoxes Galore! 189
Chapter 7 Beyond Adjustment: The Conquest of Mount Intervention 219
Chapter 8 Counterfactuals: Mining Worlds That Could Have Been 259
Chapter 9 Mediation: The Search for a Mechanism 299
Chapter 10 Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and the Big Questions 349
Acknowledgments 371
Notes 373
Bibliography 377
Index 405

A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence

"Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established 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.