What an instrumental variable does: isolates causal effect when you can't randomize

What instrumentalism claims — theories are useful tools, not descriptions of unobservable reality

Instrumentalism views theories as practical tools, not literal depictions of unobservable phenomena

What causal masking does — prevents attention to future tokens in the decoder

Causal masking in transformer models prevents attention to future tokens in the decoder, preserving autoregressive property

How the Transformer encoder differs from decoder — encoder is bidirectional, decoder is causal

Transformer encoder processes input bidirectionally, while decoder uses causal (left-to-right) masking

What rejection sampling does: samples from target by accepting/rejecting proposals

Rejection sampling generates samples from a target distribution by accepting or rejecting proposals based on a comparison with a uniform distribution

What importance sampling does: reweights samples from proposal to estimate target expectation

Importance sampling reweights samples from a proposal distribution to approximate the expectation of a target distribution

What the endowment effect causes — you value what you own more than what you don't

The endowment effect leads to overvaluation of owned items compared to identical alternatives