Statistical Learning and its results are currently pervasive in Social Sciences. A couple of months ago, Guido Imbens said: "LASSO is the new OLS".
I studied Machine Learning a little bit, and I know that its main goal is prediction. I also agree with Leo Breiman's distinction between two cultures of statistics. So, from my point of view, causality is opposed to prediction to some extent.
Considering that sciences usually try to identify and understand causal relations, is machine learning useful for this goal? In particular, what are the advantages of LASSO for causal analysis?
Are there any researchers (and papers) addressing those questions?