"you'd be doing a great service to encourage him to formulate such a "toy" question that he thinks is unanswerable without resorting to the do-calculus, which you then try to answer to the audiences' satisfaction using more standard techniques."

This would be very helpful indeed.

I think a lot of the issue comes down to how idiosyncratic Pearl's work is. It will have to accumulate quite a lot of victories before enough people will bother with it.

Until then I suspect Causality will remain something of a statistical Finnegan's Wake.

I'll probably read The Book of Why to try and get a better handle on motivation for the technical material.