The prospect of making these determinations by purely mathematical means should dazzle anybody who understands the cost and difficulty of running randomized controlled trials, even when they are physically feasible and legally permissible. The idea dazzled me, too, in the early 1990s, not as an experimenter but as a computer scientist and part-time philosopher. Surely one of the most exhilarating experiences you can have as a scientist is to sit at your desk and realize that you can finally figure out what is possible or impossible in the real world—especially if the problem is important to
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