Aydin Mohsehi @center4philsci.bsky.social. "A Bayesian Reduction of Causation in Causal Models". The part about reduction was less original than I anticipated, but I really liked the link to exchangeability and how it links causation to Bayesian probabilities. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_PT...

What was the word count of the longest referee report you've ever written?

Wait. Is The Martian just Saving Private Ryan in space? How many people does it take to save Matt Damon?

I just posted a video on the Front-Door criterion, which enables you to identify an effect using mechanisms. This video is more technical than the others, but really illustrates how causal graphs create a bridge between causes and probabilities. youtu.be/xRFOj71FPU0

Very exciting. "Frugality" is a term I coined because "sparsest Markov permutation" was a mouthful, and it I wanted to explicitly contrast it with "Faithfulness". But up to now it's been too computationally intensive to implement at scale. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Has anyone else watched Zoolander since watching Severance and picked up on the stylistic similarities?

Thinking about Mechanisms is the top cited article in @philscijournal.bsky.social (est. 1935). Their website says 1847 citations, Scholar says 4032. Says a lot about philosophy citations compared to other fields. What was the most cited in @thebjps.bsky.social? www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

After a bit of a summer pause, I'm back to making episodes. In this episode, I explain the notion of confounding, and clarify why confounders should not be thought of as alternate explanations of an observed effect. youtu.be/kAgS7cltBhM

In DAGs, confounders are variables that bias an effect measurement (i.e. they hinder identification). I regularly see a vaguer understanding of confounding as alternate explanations of an effect (e.g. I thought X caused Y, but in fact Z does). Does anyone have good examples of the latter usage?

This clip is the part of the last episode that has so far generated the most discussion. youtube.com/clip/Ugkxeuv...

An Episode in honor of Independence Day... youtu.be/7h6tnV1mEEE?...

I decided to make an introductory episode, to provide some orientation for the later episodes. In it, I introduce DAGs and explain how causation is a strategy for managing complexity. I spent a lot of time improving the sound quality, so I hope that paid off. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h6t...

Jupyter Notebooks: Stop trying to make fetch happen

How can a drug raise the chance of recovery in a population, while lowering the chance in both men and women? The answer is Simpson's paradox, which still confuses people. Here I clarify the paradox, w/ examples involving COVID-19, and testing police discrimination. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMnA...

Coming next week on Causal Foundations: Simpson's Paradox! Subscribe to my YouTube channel in order to not miss episodes when they're released. www.youtube.com/@dagophile

What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders? “Falsifiability” does not demarcate science from non-science.

Upcoming episodes (~1/week): - Simpson’s paradox - confounding (again) - causal Markov condition - collider bias - the manipulation postulate - faithfulness - varieties of interventions - causal parameters - mediation And much more. youtu.be/FABdstSaUA4?...

Illuminating the process of producing rigorous science by selecting on the dependent variable

Episode 3 "Causation Without Interventions" is now up. In it, I discuss what the most underrated concept in causal inference: identifiability. It's what enables one to measure causal effects from data. I'm still figuring out the AV side of things. Feedback welcome! youtu.be/FABdstSaUA4?...

Well, y'all wouldn't want to disagree with Huw! Episode 3: "Causation without interventions" premieres today at noon EST Prior episodes: 1: Correlation does imply causation 2: d-Separation without tears www.youtube.com/@dagophile

One of the fun things of doing the causal YouTube channel is figuring out new ways to do visualizations of causal concepts. Here's an animation for inducing d-separation by conditioning on a common cause. youtube.com/@dagophile?s...

I found Billy and Suzy! Time to put an end to their rock-throwing shenanigans!

Well, it was good while it lasted... Here's ChatGPTs denial of my request of an image of "a human trying to teach an alien to play pool, but where the alien is unable to understand because he lacks causal concepts"

Episode 2 of Causal Foundations is now online. Thanks to everyone for the very encouraging reactions to the opening video of the series. youtu.be/KVmpRaMkXWM?...

While trying to figure out how searchable my channel is on YouTube, I've stumbled across videos of talks I didn't know were there. Here's a talk I gave at Yale, recorded by a professional film crew and well summarized in the description. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m2T...

Congrats! This a great hire for Hopkins!

Episode 2 of Causal Foundations will be released on Monday. Subscribe to be notified when it is posted. youtube.com/@dagophile?s...

Over 300 views in the first day! I guess there's demand for this sort of thing. The next video (on d-Separation) will appear in about a week.

I decided to make a youtube channel in which I introduce key concepts from causal inference in videos of roughly 10 minutes. The first episode "Correlation Does Imply Causation" is now online. Feedback would be very welcome. youtu.be/uIUKXY8_G-M

Thanks @kathrynnave.bsky.social! And you give a better concise description of what’s cool about the paper than I’ve so far managed to achieve!

Thanks Sean for the shout out! The conference was absolutely terrific, and will give me things to think about for years to come. Videos of the talks will at some point be online, but here's a thread giving the gist of my commentary to those who weren't there:

Thanks also to commentators for today: Saakshi Dulani, Steven Gross, Naftali Weinberger @dagophile.bsky.social, Jeremy Goodman, Justin Clarke-Doane, and E.J. Green. So many big ideas bouncing around a collection of wonderful people. Looking forward to the big finale tomorrow.

The Natural Philosophy Symposium is underway! I had some idea of live-skeeting, but the real-time event is too absorbing. www.naturalphilosophyhopkins.org/natural-phil... Anyway, we've had: (cont)

Next Thursday 5/29, 7:00pm at Johns Hopkins: Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social gives the Distinguished Lecture in Natural Philosophy on "The Evolution of Human Intelligences: Exploit, Explore, Empower." Open to all! www.naturalphilosophyhopkins.org/event/third-...

Nice & accessible piece by Stephan Hartmann. I've long liked effective field theories, since their layered picture matches my preferred one for causal models: - "levels" correspond to zooming in/out - higher levels aggregate lower ones (under special conditions) - all models are scale relative

I’ll be thinking about this for a while. It’s one of those books that’s almost surreally immersed in recent-ish history and subcultures (Berlin hipsters c. 2010), but in a strange way reminded me of Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe from the 1930s. Have any of you read this?

Ok frequentists, let’s call a truce. This has gone too far.

This might be recency bias, but I think this is the best paper I've written. It showcases how causal models can unite engineering, dynamic systems theory and biology, while pointing to the work to be done in learning and applying causal concepts. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/25288/

You’re surely wondering: if Bugles are the “#1 Finger Hat” in America, how do they stand internationally. The story is complicated by the fact that in Dutch “vingerhoed” (finger hat) refers to a thimble (and those thimble-shaped plant) thus providing competition.

What do measles vaccine mandates, lie detection programs, and mass telecommunications surveillance have in common? Feedback loops break existing causal diagrams (DAGs). Equilibrium effects insights from Schölkopf, Dash, @dagophile.bsky.social, and more: wildetruth.substack.com/p/equilibrat...

It's going to be fun watching US conservative catholics suddenly discover that representation matters. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05...

A very nice piece calling for a better understanding of the way scale matters for extrapolation. It's also sensitive to neglected issues related to clustering. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Causal Mediation: Assessing Meaningful Path-specific Effects Rather than Decomposing the Total Effect: https://osf.io/2buxh

My paper w/ Peter Steiner "Causal Mediation: Assessing Meaningful Path-Specific Effects Rather than Decomposing the Total Effect" is now archived. For years I've been trying to explain to people why mediation is not about decomposition. Let's see if this does the trick. osf.io/preprints/ps...

I'm very close to submitting a paper and am playing around with the abstract (below). I'd welcome any reactions as to whether it gives you a good sense of what to expect in the paper and/or which audiences you think it's geared towards.

Hey, look who I stumbled upon in @nytimes.com mag! The piece reveals that @dingdingpeng.the100.ci's happiness comes not from such professional acknowledgment, but from personal connections, but based on my visit to Leipzig it seems she's rocking that front as well. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/m...

Still need to read, but a paper covering cognition, multi-scale modeling, causation, evolution, Watt governors and H. Simon definitely intersects with all my philosophical interests. There is a community around these topics, but it has yet to become self-aware. www.researchgate.net/profile/Davi...

For Monty Hall problem aficionados: a #causal DAG, with explanation in the alt text. Who knew that the M in M-bias stood for Monty?

That's nice, we discussed related ideas with @dagophile.bsky.social here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ8j... I really enjoyed the part of the discussion on low frequency confounders

Given that in British slang "fit" is roughly synonymous with "hot" in US English, does the Darwinian term "survival of the fittest" conjure up some Bachelorette-style reality show in the minds of UK readers?