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What Makes A Strong AI?
“The Book of Why” Chapters 9&10, a Read with Me series
We are at the last article reading Judea Pearl’s inspiring “The Book of Why,” and it will mostly focus on mediators and how to combine causality with big data to derive trustworthy conclusions. I will also summarize what makes a strong AI in the end based on the whole book.
Mediators
We have briefly talked about mediation in the previous articles. We mentioned it is important to identify mediators not only because we shouldn’t treat them as confounders, since conditioning on them will block the causal effect completely or partially, but also in proper cases, we can use mediators for front-door criterion when unobserved confounders exist.
In this section, we will dive deeper into different examples of mediators and understand how to properly define direct causal effect, indirect causal effect, and total causal effect when mediators exist.
In history, scurvy had always been the most terrifying disease for sailors. Before vitamins were discovered and properly named, scientists struggled to figure out how to prevent sailors from getting…
