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Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer

priceonomics.com

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Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer

#5

Post by Gatsky »

“All scientific work is incomplete," he said. "All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time.”

This is a very salient point, and I think defines the right attitude to these matters, eg climate change.

Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer

#6

Post by brittonsmith »

proteinbased wrote: post #4

Short answer: because he was employed by tobacco firms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher

The section in wikipedia that discusses this mentions that it is not clear that his employment by tobacco firms motivated his behavior: From wikipedia: 'To quote his biographers Yates and Mather, "It has been suggested that the fact that Fisher was employed as consultant by the tobacco firms in this controversy casts doubt on the value of his arguments. This is to misjudge the man. He was not above accepting financial reward for his labours, but the reason for his interest was undoubtedly his dislike and mistrust of puritanical tendencies of all kinds; and perhaps also the personal solace he had always found in tobacco."'

I believe this is thesis of the original article as well.

Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer

#10

Post by danieltillett »

Gatsky wrote: post #5

“All scientific work is incomplete," he said. "All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time.” This is a very salient point, and I think defines the right attitude to these matters, eg climate change.

Especially when you have very poor predictive models and some of the possible outcomes are catastrophic.

As an aside it is impossible to calculate the net present value of a humanity ending catastrophic event. When we are weighing up the financial cost of doing anything about the release of more GHG into the atmosphere, we have have a finite positive benefit on the release more side (i.e. coal and oil are cheaper than renewals) added to potentially infinite negative extinction event (i.e. the climate hits a runaway positive feedback rise that make human life impossible). The sum is always negative no matter how low the risk of extinction.

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