Better than I have explained causal graphs. Better than I get them wrong regularly. There is more content about causal that is wrong than is accurate. Judea Pearl mercs people weekly for mistakes. His Twitter feed is a graveyard of Ph.D. egos and published research.
Causal graphs are not difficult to understand. They are challenging to apply. This post will lean heavily on experts in causal. I will fill in the “And here’s how we use them in the field.”
The best non-math tutorial of causal graphs is this EdX course. If you are coming into this post with no prior awareness of causal graphs, this will give you a deep conceptual understanding.
Causal graphs show the relationships between variables. They represent simple, complex, and dynamical systems. Everything makes more sense when you look at causal graphs and see the system they represent.
This post covers simple graphs. This series gets a lot more complex from here.