Figuring out how the world works: causality in a world full of real people

Speaker: Konrad Kording

Abstract: Causality is key to many branches of science, engineering, and the alignment of AI systems. I will start by highlighting the difficulties of causal inference in the real world, and build some intuition about why in the real world causality is difficult while it seems easy in our mind. I will continue by reviewing the mechanisms that people use to figure out causality and emphasize that they usually do it differently than, say, a specialist in …

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