> This book dwells on the history of statistics a lot, and statisticians, as the authors would have you believe, are zealots who have conspired to keep causal thinking out of their field right from the start. That is, until Pearl instigated the "Causal Revolution", as he dubs it, the latest and greatest gift to modern science. I have no dog in this fight, but Pearl (whom I assume is the source of most of these opinions put to paper by Mackenzie) often comes across as wildly biased and grandiose. For what it's worth, I doubt that statisticians as a whole are anywhere as malicious or ignorant as they're portrayed in this book.<p>This is correct AFAICT (I'm not a statistician even though I read a lot of the statistics literature). The strange thing is that I've never seen any obvious benefits to his comments of this nature. In the most generous possible reading, they are a distraction, with a less generous reading being that you can't trust his interpretation of anything.