And Pearl isnt just complaining - the provided an alternative. So it seems that one side identified a problem, curated examples, delivered a solution, and now the other side doesnt care about the problem - and causality is not a trivial problem. As academic discussion, not a business meeting, to me thats subpar.
That’s only my view from the outside, it may well be the case that it is wrong and I just need to review more in depth Pearl to see that he does not bring anything useful.
The primary message of Pearl is "all other methods are trash and all empirical work done using those methods is trash." My interpretation of the post is that Gelman is arguing other methods are not trash.
I probably agree more with Pearl than Gelman on the details, but Pearl's approach is just not appropriate for an academic setting.
Debating who gets to use which words is a great way to make sure your debate only matters to other academics. I'd love to see the causality camp make their point by unlocking some great new applied results instead!
Is this sufficiently applied for you? Pearl may not apply his work on causality often, but there are a lot of people who are on the applied side who do.
Why? The only thing that matters is the quality of the empirical work. You can get caught up in philosophical debates about the best way to do research. If it has no impact on empirical work, it's useless.
That's not to say Pearl's arguments are wrong or that his work is useless. The problem is the incompleteness of his arguments. You can't arrogantly dismiss empirical work just because it's imperfect. There's no reason a priori to expect that Pearl's approach will lead to better decisions.
There are many self-proclaimed experts who can point out the flaws in programming language designs, but that doesn't mean they can design a better language, and it doesn't mean existing programming languages are useless. Pearl's approach is not some kind of magic pixie dust that suddenly guarantees your empirical work is more trustworthy. It's unfortunate that Pearl thinks it is, and it prevents him from having a reasonable conversation about the topic.