Comment by dsizzle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsizzle | Hacker News Reader

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This comment (and often the "correlation != causation" discussion more generally) seems to equate "causation" with "proof of causation" (in a mathematical sense), which is a flawed criteria for science IMO. The causation part (not the mere association) is the substance, so it's appropriate to use causal language.

Of course any such explanation is provisional. I might think your comment is just to complain the provisional aspect isn't mentioned in the quote (I think it'd be tiresome to say that in every statement, and the public's understanding of science being provisional is underestimated), but you seem to think it's a problem that causal language is used at all?

While quote may have been offhand, look at what the actual paper says [1]: "[the study] design prevent[s] strong conclusions regarding causation." Note that it doesn't say it prevents any conclusions regarding causation.

By the way, it seems weird that you yourself have come to believe it's causal, while seemingly denying that this paper provides any basis. How did you come to that conclusion then?

[1] In the last paragraph: https://content.iospress.com/download/journal-of-alzheimers-...

The quote isn't offhand, it's directly and explicitly making claims of causality, e.g. talking about the "effect" and saying the vaccination "reduces the risk".

Yes the paper says differently. So what? We're used to this from epidemiology by now. The claims they make to the government/media/public about disease frequently don't match their actual data. To discover this you have to not only read the paper but often dig through the most obscure parts of it. The fact that their claims are wrong will only emerge in, like, table 3 of Appendix 2 which is by the way only available on GitHub if at all. Here it emerges in literally the last paragraph. Then someone blogs about this and they get kicked off Twitter for spreading "misinformation".

The public's understanding of science being provisional is actually excellent and far better than the supposedly elite decision making classes. That's why the public increasingly doesn't trust claims made by scientists, and correctly so. Scientists will make bold claims of causation whilst actually having a sketchy P=0.049 regression at best and a fictional model built on circular logic at worst.

We need to hold scientists to higher standards, and especially epidemiologists. The amount of damage their sloppy "offhand" approach has caused is astronomical. Or, quicker, just accept that they aren't going to improve, have learned nothing from COVID and cut them out of society and the public conversation entirely.

You missed my point. I don't actually think the quote was offhand either (another comment suggested that possibility), but the lines from the paper I cited also uses causal language. My point is that using causal language is fine (understanding that it's provisional as all science is), and I think the scientist quote is fine.

You think the scientist quote is dishonest? It seems you too conflate causality with something like proven mathematically or 100% confidence.

If they're going to claim causality for vaccines->less Alzheimers then yes, they need pretty close to 100% confidence for that because this is the sort of thing that gets translated into mandatory government policies. What they have here is literally nothing, it's just a correlation. They don't have any evidence of a causal relation, and they don't have any suggested biological pathway either. It's malpractice to assert causality given such a total absence of evidence.

Moreover, as a killed comment elsewhere in this thread points out, it's very likely that they made a mistake somewhere. This claim is absurd on its face. A 40% effect size is enormous. Alzheimer's is tracked very closely and there has been no change in incidence over time:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-dementias

Flu vaccines on the other hand have become far more prevalent over the last 20 years especially amongst the age groups most at risk for Alzheimers. So, where's the impact? There isn't any. If flu vaccines really reduced the risk that much then we'd see it in the actual numbers, as a 40% reduction is hard to hide.

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