[bart_spoon]

The “benefit” is that Pearl’s causality is reinventing the wheel, and his approach is a smokescreen for this. Causal inference has been a thing in statistics since the 1930s. There is absolutely nothing Pearl has developed here that makes a practical difference when it comes to actually establishing causality over methods we’ve had for a century. So to prop up his contributions to the causal “revolution”, he attempts to paint a picture where statisticians are a hopelessly backward, regressive group, and hopes the uninitiated won’t know any better. It seems like he has largely succeeded.