chapters—Sewall Wright’s path diagrams and their extension to structural causal models (SCMs). We got a good taste of this in Chapter 1, in the example of the firing squad, which showed how to answer counterfactual questions such as “Would the prisoner be alive if rifleman A had not shot?” I will compare how counterfactuals are defined in the Neyman-Rubin paradigm and in SCMs, where they enjoy the benefit of causal diagrams. Rubin has steadfastly maintained over the years that diagrams serve no useful purpose. So we will examine how students of the Rubin causal model must navigate causal
...more
