The academic feud between Judea Pearl and Guido Imbens on causal graphs
robseamans · x · 2026-08-21
The post revisits the mid-2010s academic feud between Judea Pearl and Nobel laureate Guido Imbens regarding the usefulness of causal graphical models. Imbens argued that in simple Instrumental Variable settings, causal graphs add little value. Pearl countered in his blog comments, suggesting that economists avoiding graphs might be limiting themselves to simple settings because they cannot handle complexity, unlike epidemiologists who embraced the 'causal revolution'.
Related event: Revisiting the Pearl–Imbens Debate over Causal Graphs(2 posts)→
More from Research
- Nature Study: AI Antibody Generation Struggles with Generalization — anshulkundaje · 2026-08-21
- Semantic Caching Test: Rewriting Bad Cache Hits Is Worse Than Missing — Reasonable_Royal_621 · 2026-08-21
- Statistical Simulations Are Hard, Says Ian Arawjo — IanArawjo · 2026-08-21
- How to Make a Simple Photochromic System That Turns Blue Under UV — johnowhitaker · 2026-08-21
- Kaggle Launches Adversarial Customer Service Benchmark for AI Security — MeganRisdal · 2026-08-21
- Research proposes dynamic compression for in-context continual learning — HanGuo97 · 2026-08-21