"The debate is now over" ... I wish. On paper, maybe, but on the streets I still see a sizable portion of population that believes smoking is not so bad when combined with drinking, or that smoking thinner cigarettes is ok.
Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
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Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
#12Short 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 financia…
There is still an open debate among statisticians as to whether employment of statisticians by tobacco firms causes statisticians to disbelieve in tobacco-caused cancer.
Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
#13"The debate is now over" ... I wish. On paper, maybe, but on the streets I still see a sizable portion of population that believes smoking is not so bad when combined with drinking, or that smoking thinner cigarettes is ok.
it's an irrational mix of not-me behavior, plain ignorance to one's health in the future, good old addict behavior and so on. humans are far from being rational beings, and addictions are all about emotions
Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
#14“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 tha…
What if all the possible course of action do have a small probability of causing our extinction? After all, any money spent in any other matter than astronomy yields the risk to make us miss an incoming asteroid (or an angry alien fleet)
If your tool allows infinite negative, it fails at providing guidelines.
Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
#15“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 tha…
> The sum is always negative no matter how low the risk of extinction.
That makes this model rather useless for arguing what must be done. For example, it's ridiculously, incredibly unlikely that making tea will lead to extinction by nuclear armageddon. But it's not impossible. As such, making tea would also have an infinite, negative expected value. It would be effectively as bad as just pressing the nuclear button.
That being said, I think your only problem is in assuming that the human race is infinitely valuable. It's not. There's definitely a limit to how much an individual would give up to prevent extinction.
Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
#16"The debate is now over" ... I wish. On paper, maybe, but on the streets I still see a sizable portion of population that believes smoking is not so bad when combined with drinking, or that smoking thinner cigarettes is ok.
Just because the debate is over, doesn't mean people will stop doing it. People do things they know to be harmful every day, from drinking high-sugar soda to eating large amounts of red meat. It's just people.
Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
> The sum is always negative no matter how low the risk of extinction. That makes this model rather useless for arguing what must be done. For example, it's ridiculously, incredibly unlikely that making tea will lead to extinction by nuclear armageddon. But it's not impossible. As such, making tea would also have an infinite, negative expected value. It would be effectively as bad as just pressing the nuclear button.…
I did say that the net present value is impossible to calculate ;)
More seriously what would you pay to avoid the extinction of humanity? If the answer is everything then the price is infinite.
Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
What if all the possible course of action do have a small probability of causing our extinction? After all, any money spent in any other matter than astronomy yields the risk to make us miss an incoming asteroid (or an angry alien fleet) If your tool allows infinite negative, it fails at providing guidelines.
I am just suggesting that this is an example of what the maths tells us, not that it is a useful model.
In practice humans accepts some chance of extinction in return for an economic benefit. The only problem is as a species we do tend to ignore the long rail risk even when that risk is rather more than zero.
Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
#19"The debate is now over" ... I wish. On paper, maybe, but on the streets I still see a sizable portion of population that believes smoking is not so bad when combined with drinking, or that smoking thinner cigarettes is ok.
Just because the debate is over, doesn't mean people will stop doing it. People do things they know to be harmful every day, from drinking high-sugar soda to eating large amounts of red meat. It's just people.
The red meat thing is false BTW.
Re: Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The sum is always negative no matter how low the risk of extinction. That makes this model rather useless for arguing what must be done. For example, it's ridiculously, incredibly unlikely that making tea will lead to extinction by nuclear armageddon. But it's not impossible. As such, making tea would also have an infinite, negative expected value. It would be effectively as bad as just pressing the nuclear button.…
I did say that the net present value is impossible to calculate ;) More seriously what would you pay to avoid the extinction of humanity? If the answer is everything then the price is infinite.
I would pay X-1 dollars, where X is the cost of creating a shelter for me and the people I care about from the apocalypse.
There's a bunch of weird issues in this analysis when you pit morally good outcomes vs economically good outcomes.