Books about Causation from Amazon.com

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas..
Price: $3.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Did mandatory busing programs in the 1970s increase the school achievement of disadvantaged minority youth? Does obtaining a college degree increase an individual's labor market earnings? Did the use of a butterfly ballot in some Florida counties in the 2000 presidential election cost Al Gore votes? Simple cause-and-effect questions such as these are the motivation for much empirical work in the social sciences. In this book, the counterfactual model of causality for observational data analysis is presented, and methods for causal effect estimation are demonstrated using examples from sociology, political science, and economics..
Price: $24.63 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $5.66 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Written by one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, this book provides a comprehensive exposition of modern analysis of causation It shows how causality has grown from a nebulous concept into a mathematical theory with significant applications in the fields of statistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, cognitive science, and the health and social sciences. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions and observations. The book will open the way for including causal analysis in the standard curriculum of statistics, artifical intelligence, business, epidemiology, social science and economics. Students in these areas will find natural models, simple identification procedures, and precise mathematical definitions of causal concepts that traditional texts have tended to evade or make unduly complicated. This book will be of interest to professionals and students in a wide variety of fields. Anyone who wishes to elucidate meaningful relationships from data, predict effects of actions and policies, assess explanations of reported events, or form theories of causal understanding and causal speech will find this book stimulating and invaluable. Professor of Computer Science at the UCLA, Judea Pearl is the winner of the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Award in Computers and Cognitive Science..
Price: $30.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In The Meaning of Life the Dalai Lama presents the basic worldview of Buddhism while answering some of life's most profound and challenging questions: Why are we in this situation? Where are we going? How should we live our lives? Do our lives have any meaning? Basing his explanation on the twelve links of dependent-arising as depicted in the Buddhist image of the Wheel of Life, His Holiness vividly describes how human beings become trapped in a counterproductive prison of selfishness and suffering, and shows how to reverse the process, changing the limiting prison into a source of help and happiness for others. Suffused with the Dalai Lama's intelligence, wit, and kindness, these teachings address such issues as how to deal with aggression from within and without; how to reconcile personal responsibility with the doctrine of selflessness; how to face a terminal illness; how to help someone who is dying; how to reconcile love for family with love for all beings; and how to integrate this practice into everyday life..
Price: $9.48 [Notify me when price goes down.]

With Karma 101, we'll turn this ancient Eastern doctrine on its head. Karma is a notoriously vague concept; we'll outline the basics, debunk the mysteries surrounding it, and offer a kitschy but practical take on karma, including ways for readers to use it to their advantage -- in this lifetime. Some of the tips offered include: -- Controlling your karma -- Deflecting other people's karma -- How to prevent coming back as a pauper in your next life -- Techniques to speed up karma Rooted in spirituality, this quirky introduction to karma is geared toward the armchair Buddhist. It is the only approach to this subject that isn't overly complex and esoteric. There's no need to wade through lengthy volumes of material -- the essence of karma is within your grasp. Start practicing today!.
Price: $6.18 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason is arguably the single most important philosophical work in Western philosophy. It is also one of the most difficult philosophical texts to study. This clear, straightforward guide to the Critique recasts Kant's thought in more familiar language, avoiding the technicalities that plague other secondary sources on Kant. Sebastian Gardner examines Kant's thought by contrasting two interpretive traditions--those of Strawson and Allison--while setting the Critique in the context of both pre-Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Ideal for anyone coming to Kant's thought for the first time, this accessible guide will be vital reading for all students of Kant in philosophy..
Price: $19.14 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Human beings are active agents who can think. To understand how thought serves action requires understanding how people conceive of the relation between cause and effect, between action and outcome. In cognitive terms, how do people construct and reason with the causal models we use to represent our world? A revolution is occurring in how statisticians, philosophers, and computer scientists answer this question. Those fields have ushered in new insights about causal models by thinking about how to represent causal structure mathematically, in a framework that uses graphs and probability theory to develop what are called causal Bayesian networks. The framework starts with the idea that the purpose of causal structure is to understand and predict the effects of intervention. How does intervening on one thing affect other things? This is not a question merely about probability (or logic), but about action. The framework offers a new understanding of mind: Thought is about the effects of intervention and cognition is thus intimately tied to actions that take place either in the actual physical world or in imagination, in counterfactual worlds. The book offers a conceptual introduction to the key mathematical ideas, presenting them in a non-technical way, focusing on the intuitions rather than the theorems. It tries to show why the ideas are important to understanding how people explain things and why thinking not only about the world as it is but the world as it could be is so central to human action. The book reviews the role of causality, causal models, and intervention in the basic human cognitive functions: decision making, reasoning, judgment, categorization, inductive inference, language, and learning. In short, the book offers a discussion about how people think, talk, learn, and explain things in causal terms, in terms of action and manipulation..
Price: $28.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]