Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer | Hacker News Reader

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

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82 pointswanderer4229 comments

“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.

> 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.

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.

Yes there certainly is. The best way to think about this I think is that the price you are willing to pay is a finite amount close to the maximum you are capable of paying. There might be difference between people in how close to the theoretical maximum they are willing to pay, but the differences are relative small in comparison to the total most are willing to pay.

How much would a person pay to avoid their own death? I'm not willing to give up skiing, despite that doing so would slightly decrease the probability of accidental death. I enjoy it too much, and there's no point in living a life without joy.

Similarly, there is a limit as to what the human race as a whole is willing to give up to prevent extinction. For example, it's not worth it to put every person on Earth into a lifetime of miserable slavery just to decrease the odds of extinction from 1% to 0.9%.

But there's also the fact that not investing in x-risk enables you to invest in economic and scientific growth, which themselves enable future x-risk reduction. However high the cost of an x-risk, it's entirely possible that the optimal response is to not directly invest in it at the moment. Someone worried about asteroid impacts in 1800 would be best off working towards economic growth or better telescopes or something like that. So there are still rational grounds to prefer some actions to others.

Of course what is the best way to minimise the risk is a question for debate. Personally I think we should be investing a massive amount in energy R&D and efficient ways of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere so if we do start to slip into a runaway greenhouse event we are in a position to do something about it. If we just continue along the path we are on (do nothing) if something catastrophic does happen we will not have the tools to respond.

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.

That's the Fisher of the Fisher-Yates (a.k.a. Knuth) shuffle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle

Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Paradox

Long /r/statistics discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/53vpvy/why_the_...

"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.

Replace with anything you fancy, then. The point still stands. People do bad stuff to themselves fully aware of the consequences.

Like eating too many, too few, or just the right amount of eggs high in good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, or just the right amount of morally ambiguous cholesterol.

Whatever blows your hair back, bud.

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

So uh... did he die of cancer?

isn't Gauss the father of modern statistics?

Gauss did some interesting work related to least squares and linear regression, but Fisher came up with the null hypothesis and P-values, Maximum Likelihood Estimation, the concept of a control and designed experiment, and some other stuff.

50% of most standard statistics courses fell out of his head.

Follow the money...

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.

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.

Slightly shorter answer: because he smoked.

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