Many people still make Niles’s mistake of thinking that the goal of causal analysis is to prove that X is a cause of Y or else to find the cause of Y from scratch. That is the problem of causal discovery, which was my ambitious dream when I first plunged into graphical modeling and is still an area of vigorous research. In contrast, the focus of Wright’s research, as well as this book, is representing plausible causal knowledge in some mathematical language, combining it with empirical data, and answering causal queries that are of practical value.
