Causality….

Just got this excellent book on the topic of causality , very strange yet intresting subject

….. the author writes in start ……………

 

"I got my first hint of the dark world of causality during my junior year of high school.

My science teacher, Dr. Feuchtwanger, introduced us to the study of logic by discussing the 19th century finding that more people died from smallpox inoculations than from smallpox itself. Some people used this information to argue that inoculation was harmful when, in fact, the data proved the opposite, that inoculation was saving lives by eradicating smallpox.

"And here is where logic comes in," concluded Dr. Feuchtwanger, "To protect us from cause-effect fallacies of this sort." We were all enchanted by the marvels of logic, even though Dr. Feuchtwanger never actually showed us how logic protects us from such fallacies.

It doesn’t, I realized years later as an artificial intelligence researcher. Neither logic, nor any branch of mathematics had developed adequate tools for managing problems, such as the smallpox inoculations, involving cause-effect relationships. Most of my colleagues even considered causal vocabulary to be dangerous, avoidable, ill-defined, and nonscientific. "Causality is endless controversy," one of them warned. The accepted style in scientific papers was to write "A implies B" even if one really meant "A causes B," or to state "A is related to B" if one was thinking "A affects B."

Clearly, such denial of causal thought could not last forever. The influence of artificial intelligence and the availability of powerful computer languages gave my generation the expectation that intuition should be expressed, not suppressed. And causality, it turns out, is not nearly as nasty as her reputation suggests. Once I got past a few mental blocks, I found causality to be smiling with clarity, bursting with new ideas and new possibilities. As the epilogue of my book summarizes:

             "Causality is not mystical or metaphysical.
             It can be understood in terms of simple processes,
             and it can be expressed in a friendly mathematical
             language, ready for computer analysis."

My intended audience includes: students of statistics who wonder why instructors are reluctant to discuss causality in class; students of epidemiology who wonder why simple concepts such as "confounding" are so terribly complex when expressed mathematically; students of economics and social science who often doubt the meaning of the parameters they estimate; and, naturally, students of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, who write programs and theories for knowledge discovery, causal explanations and causal speech.

I have aimed to provide each of these groups with separate ideas and techniques to make causal inference easier in their respective fields. The techniques will be a success only if they help resolve challenging problems in those fields, and I am fairly confident they will.

              Judea Pearl
             Los Angeles, California
             February 1, 2000

"

 

 

 

 

Heart Of Darkness

 

Written as the memory of one man, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness reads like a journey through one’s nightmare.  So many interesting but minor characters and scenes dart across the pages that it is difficult to name all of Conrad’s possible themes.  However, two main themes prevail: journey and truth.

 

 

Heart of Darkness is based on Conrad’s firsthand experience of the Congo region of West Africa. Conrad was actually sent up the Congo River to an inner station to rescue a company agent—not named Kurtz but Georges-Antoine Klein—who died a few days later aboard ship. The story is told in the words of Charlie Marlow, a seaman, and filtered through the thoughts of an unidentified listening narrator. It is on one level about a voyage into the heart of the Belgian Congo, and on another about the journey into the soul of man. In 1902, Heart of Darkness was published in a separate volume along with two other stories by Conrad. Many critics consider the book a literary bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a forerunner both of modern literary techniques and approaches to the theme of the ambiguous nature of truth, evil, and morality. By presenting the reader with a clearly unreliable narrator whose interpretation of events is often open to question, Conrad forces the reader to take an active part in the story’s construction and to see and feel its events for him—or herself

 

links to this novel

 

http://www.enotes.com/darkness/

http://www.novelguide.com/heartofdarkness/