How can a top scientist be so confidently wrong? R. A. Fisher and smoking (2022)
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
He was wrong about smoking, but the more you read about him the less you’ll believe it had much to do with money. He was used to being right about so many things, and in this area he was blind.
The article also throws shade at him as a “eugenicist.” I looked it up, and again, the truth is more complex. He wrote this in the 50s:
“I am sorry that there should be propaganda in favour of miscegenation in North America as I am sure it can do nothing but harm. Is it beyond human endeavour to give and justly administer equal rights to all citizens without fooling ourselves that these are equivalent items?”
So first — even using the word “miscegenation” puts you in a bad camp, and there’s no defending his attitude against interracial marriage. OTOH he seemed honestly to believe in the “equal rights” part, too. Too much of the old British “white man’s burden” bullshit, I believe.
You didn't look it up very well.
>In 1911, Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes, R. C. Punnett, and Horace Darwin. After members of the Cambridge Society – including Fisher – stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912, a link was forged with the Eugenics Society (UK).[122] He saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues that encompassed and drove his interest in both genetics and statistics. During World War I Fisher started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal, being hired for a part-time position.
I think that if you:
1. are the founding chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society,
2. stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912,
3. saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues, and
4. started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal
..you are a eugenicist.
My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted.
Is it possible to say “were a eugenicist”? Your info is about him decades before the equal rights quote from the GP. It’s possible he changed his mind over the prevailing four decades (I hope)
There's far less justification for inventing a conversion out of whole cloth.
I have no idea about Fisher specifically. I hadn't really heard of him until this was posted. Eugenics was popular among a lot of academics in the early 20th century however.
The question here is about whether there is any shred of evidence that it did happen.
imo if you told me the NSA was aggregating data about everyone's daily movements, made corrections for wealth, upbringing, network as well as other factors maybe would be a good start
but even then there will be coefficients the rich kids running the clusters will be like "wealth isn't paying for tuition it's flying to europe for vacation" or "having two cars did not contribute in any shape way or form to my learning how to drive I did it because I'm inherently chosen" or "your family beating you anytime you socialized couldn't form socially crippling neural pathways so if you can't network it's because you aren't chosen" so they set the coefficient to that now some poor schmuck who couldn't afford any of those things and had the worst upbringing gets euthanized in the name of science
eugenics to be even remotely ethical would need so much data we just don't have. maybe in a thousand years but who knows how the rich kids will be like then one thing I've learned the world is not for the poor
Keynes was the leading economist of the 20th century. He has some ideas I think are dubious, and his followers have doubled down (I still can't believe people believe in fiscal multipliers greater than 1). Nevertheless, it would be an incredible cheap shot to label Keynes a "eugenicist" when criticizing his economic theories.
Tossing in swipes like "You didn't look it up very well", or snark twisters like "My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted", is bad for many reasons, including that (1) it degrades the forum; (2) it evokes worse from others; and (3) it discredits your viewpoint, which is particularly bad if it happens to be true.
I’m genuinely confused because his comment was valuable to me.
OP had either made an error or was attempting to mislead the audience by downplaying critical facts in his argument and patent highlighted it, which I appreciate because no one has the time to digest all the references.
Cherry picking or skippping over critical context is unhelpful at best or deceptive st worst.
In general responding with a statement that assigns a quality to someone's work and effort is not appropriate. You can say "That information is not correct" if you want to be assertive but saying "You have not researched or read the correct information" is doing more then correcting information and becomes personal.
I've seen a lot of people, myself included have trouble with this distinction. But I have found it to be an important part of being "considerate" of others and being charismatic to them. People really react differently to the smallest of nuance in tone and wording regardless if they are adults. (I'd actually wager adults react much more strongly to that nuance due to having more experience to tell the nuances apart)
The whole domain of interpersonal relations at scale is vastly understudied.
Yet it derails topics, it leads to bad feelings, it brings out the worst in us. Better to stop it at the root. The guidelines are simple. Dang tends to ask nicely rather than ban people. Mostly it works.
I don’t see this as hypersensitivity. I mean, there are plenty of places online where you can insult people however you please and it flows like water. I, for one, enjoy a place that tries to be the opposite.
Sadly not. I'm tempted to say "most adults aren't adults", but the actual dynamics are more what dmos62 described.
Let's say most of us are adults most of the time, but that gap between "most" and "all" is, given a large-enough population, more than enough to ruin every thread if care isn't taken to avoid this.
Edit: one factor that often goes unappreciated is the size of the community. Small, cohesive communities can support more robust (or even aggressive) styles of interaction—especially when people have other things in common that unite them. In the past I've often compared this to rugby teams [1] that beat the crap out of each other and then go to the pub together; or literary or comedy communities where the art of insulting each other is part of the fun. These dynamics break down completely in a context like HN, where the group size is orders of magnitude larger and the bonds holding people together are super weak, if they exist at all.
It's not that those other styles of communication are bad or wrong—they're great! in contexts where they don't cause people to come to blows—but they're not good here, because the context can't support them. In the current context—the large, anonymous, public internet forum—the cost of keeping the community going is a certain blandness [2] of communication. I'm not fond of that either, but one can't wish these tradeoffs away.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
dang has admitted he doesn't always get it perfect, and you may not agree with his decisions, but I think we can all understand the principles behind them, and people may not know how fortunate and rare that is.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
would be cool to read alternative history fiction where poor people came up with belief systems
https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/mxp/speeches/mxt14....
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/06/10/481414008...
Frequently expressed across the colonial Commonwealth, Canada to Australia, South Africa and elsewhere.
eg Daisy Bates (sometime wife of Breaker Morant) wrote in the state newspaper in regard of Australian Aborigines:
Aboriginal civil-rights leader, William Harris, wrote an article in response and said bi-racial Aboriginal people could be of value to Australian society. Bates replied, "as to the half-castes, however early they may be taken and trained, with very few exceptions, the only good half-caste is a dead one."
Miscegenation Laws regarding mixing of races remained in force in Bates part of the world until the 1960s, as did others enforcing the separation of mixed children from their families.
It seems less "a solution to racism" and more an excuse to enforce racist ideas aand attitudes.
Pizza delivery hasn't led me to time machines yet :(
unlike David Ricardo my wants are not infinite lol
Not just a solution to racism, but also a defense against genocide. Forced interracial "marriages", rape, etc were used as a genocidal tool against the natives along with murder. Natives who refused to mix with whites were derogatorily called racists by the white settlers.
Miscegenation was actually supported by natives, blacks, asians, etc in order preserve their cultures/races in a white dominated nation. Racism ( by all sides ) actually preserved diversity in the US for centuries. Otherwise, everyone would be white due to demographic realities of the nation.
"Beyond this, people make mistakes. Brilliance represents an upper bound on the quality of your reasoning, but there is no lower bound. The most brilliant scientist in the world can take really dumb stances. Indeed, the success that often goes with brilliance can encourage a blind stubbornness. Not always—some top scientists are admirably skeptical of their own ideas—but sometimes. And if you want to be stubborn, again, there’s no lower bound on how wrong you can be. The best driver in the world can still decide to turn the steering wheel and crash into a tree."
It is one of those profound realizations that seems so obviously true it's irrelevant. But then ask if we evaluate the decisions and statements from smart people this way. Generally the answer is no.
While the brilliant person will have higher quality reasoning on average due to the stretching of the distribution... any individual belief or statement they come up with is being drawn from a distribution that still includes boneheadely wrong.
One is reminded of Linus Pauling's flubs on two counts: his obsession with Vitamin C and his denial of quasicrystals.
The (fairly obvious) lesson here is that people lose their objectivity when it comes to fighting over stuff that involves their identity.
I loved cigarettes. I haven't smoked in almost 15 years and I might say I still love cigarettes. There really is no replacement for the feeling of being a smoker, waking up in the morning and drinking coffee with a cigarette as the sun comes up. That is a large part of what makes the addiction so bad.
I say this even with the benefit of knowing how horrible they are for health. It is why I quit eventually.
It is really hard to be objective about your partner when you are in love. A highly abusive partner at that.
I suspect the only thing stronger in humans than love is denial. The combination can be especially deluding.
Disproving this hypothesis is tricky, and Judea Pearl does a brilliant job of explaining the problem and its solution in his marvelous book: The Book of Why.
Fisher gets “assist points” for debilitating and killing millions, although full horrible credit goes to cigarette companies and their advertising co-conspirators.
Judea Pearl points out one cruel irony: The cholinergic receptor gene CHRNA5 that modulates risk of nicotine addiction also modulates lung cancer risk separately. To sort out the causality we now use Mendelian randomization.
Bottom line: smoking cigarettes does kill even when you tidy up the statistics and genetics.
The actual issue was not that (Cornfield wrote a paper in 1959 showing the effect was too small). It was that Fisher continued to repeat one finding in one study, despite that said finding had not been replicated in new studies (namely, lung cancer patients described themselves as inhalers less often than the controls), and continued to obstinately ignore all the other research coming out. But it was only 3 years between Cornfield and Fisher's death in 1962, so perhaps Fisher simply did not have time to change his mind.
Even if that finding were true, it could just mean that the cancer patients had stopped inhaling due to lung problems and underestimated how much they used to inhale.
If you asked me to estimate my caffeine, alcohol, fat, or sugar estimate from even 10 or 15 years ago, or how many steps per day I walked, I’m not confident I could give an accurate answer at all. If you asked me details about how I ate and drank — how fast I ate, how often I ate out, how quickly I replenished empty drinks, what percentage of the time I drank water with alcohol, or how often I cleaned my plate — I’m sure I’d be completely off the mark.
What's interesting to me is how some can recognize this in the past but not the present, or think it only applies in certain domains.
Am I missing something -- does this article spell out to what extent Fisher himself defended smoking?
> If, for example, it were possible to infer that smoking cigarettes is a cause of this disease, it would equally be possible to infer on exactly similar grounds that inhaling cigarette smoke was a practice of considerable prophylactic value in preventing the disease, for the practice of inhaling is rarer among patients with cancer of the lung than with others. [...] There is nothing to stop those who greatly desire it from believing that lung cancer is caused by smoking cigarettes. They should also believe that inhaling cigarette smoke is a protection. To believe either is, however, to run the risk of failing to recognize, and therefore failing to prevent, other and more genuine causes.
As a geneticist, he of course took the position that it was a smoking gene confounding the causation.
Today, most of this is well understood. MIT sells its brand under MIT Media Lab, something you can easily understand if you read the theses published by this division of the university. Other universities sell their brand under things like 30 day courses that grant a certificate named similarly to their graduate degrees. In some sense, they are internalizing the surplus generated by the brand. Interesting model.
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done. - Peter Ustinov
You don't think one of the world's foremost statisticians should have felt that he was qualified to participate in a purely statistical argument?
You see this wherein he has mostly avoids ruining spacex because he knows he isn't a rocket scientist but absolutely wrecks Twitter because he thinks he understands it.
See also his delusions about mars, desire to use a minisub in a cave rescue so tight divers had to remove tanks, stopping services needed for 2FA, and suggestion for relay satelites between earth and mars to communucate faster.
He's absolutely intellectually average with a way above average personality, ego, and wallet.
We reward and give status to scientists that come up with answers and the people doing the hard framing work not so much. The two guys that used standard crystallography techniques to figure out DNA is a double helix got the Nobel prize. The lady that figured out how to crystalize DNA and get the films is completely ignored.
So yeah top scientists high on their own ego will totally biff it when dealing with some other field they know nothing about.
The reason W&C won the prize is that not only did the propose the (close to correct) structure, they realized it was a antiparallel double helix, and deduced the underlying mechanism for genetic replication: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." and also made a few key observations about isomerization in bases that allows for G/C and A/T pairing to be specific.
Crick was a genius, although he also went off-piste with panspermia, and Watson is just an asshole. Franklin was a great scientist but it's not clear at all that she should have or would have received the prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
It's hardly limited to Nobel laureates. But it's certainly a strong marker that somebody had indeed tremendous scientific skills, and then failed utterly to apply that ability later.
See also: Engineer's disease.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
I'm kinda not a fan of the list there, since it tries to tar a few early-20th century folks with connections with ESP and parapsychology, but my understanding is those ideas weren't as kooky back then as they are now.
His conclusion mostly is that cleverness does not shield you from believing falsehoods. These are 2 distincts properties of the mind. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Smart people are very good at finding causes that justify what they believe in.
The point is that there is a ton of things that we know that are in fact based on beliefs. Like: did I ever see an atom with my own eyes? Nope. Did I see a clock slow down because it flew in a rocket really fast? Nope. Did I ever check that the moon landing looked legit? Nope.
One of my favorites is the controversy about Q-tips, there are tons of people who say it's bad for your ears, and then there's a guy who did a study that concluded that no study ever proved that Q-tips were bad for your ears. I know Q-tips are probably bad for my ears, but they feel so good, so whenever my wife brings up that I should stop using them, I always refer her to that one guy who tried to prove that Q-tips weren't that bad.
I did have to unwax them a while back like 12 years ago, it's not unpleasant, you put a liquid in your ear, and it reacts with the wax and it starts to bubble in a tingly way. It feels all weird. And then you squirt some warm water to remove everything.
For example, it took a while for germ theory to gain acceptance. People cannot see germs, so it's hard to believe in then. But people also fervently believe in ghosts and bad luck, neither of which can be seen.
Both are ultimately "caused" by a lack of information. When the lack itself is enticing because it creates mystery, it invites fantastic theories and superstition, but if it's not, it generates doubt and resistance.
Conspiracy theories resonate because you can always form a picture that explains the mystery in an enticing way in the same primitive way that weather must be created by the gods and ghosts are responsible for strange sounds in the attic.
This kind of dichotomy between credulity and incredulity is seen everywhere where humans need to deal with the absence of clear information. What I find fascinating is that while science has given us tons of powerful tools to reveal the unseen, we are still so powerfully drawn to the opposite side.
There is much to learn from considering this reality, but most will dismiss it as irrelevant.
Like what?
For.. the.. money?
Money is a very conservative cause. Anything that gets in the way of money is "terrorist" and "commonism" (sic).
It should be noted, tobacco was the cash crop that finally made England's American adventure profitsble. Without it, we euro-americans might be speaking french or Spanish across all of north america now...
That said I'm curious if we're projecting back strong moralistic or party/ideology-aligned takes on smoking before it was really prevalent. I don't think anyone is questioning the role money plays in broadly misleading the public about smoking itself, just that the ideological/partisan divide such as it exists today might not map cleanly to the past.
I would suggest that if they're taking money to spout bad science, they're not actually brilliant. So I would suggest this pushes the question back yet further, why do we (still?) think he was brilliant?
"Great men" vs. "impersonal historical process" is one of those dichotomies that will never be resolved. If you find yourself at either extreme, you're making an obvious error. Find a comfortable place somewhere in the middle.
Fisher's exact test; Fisher's inequality; Fisher's principle; Fisher's geometric model; Fisher's Iris data set; Fisher's linear discriminant; Fisher's equation; Fisher information; Fisher's method; Fisherian runaway; Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection; Fisher's noncentral hypergeometric distribution; Fisher's z-distribution; Fisher transformation; Fisher consistency; F-distribution; F-test; Fisher–Tippett distribution; Fisher–Tippett–Gnedenko theorem; Fisher–Yates shuffle; Fisher–Race blood group system; Behrens–Fisher problem; Cornish–Fisher expansion; von Mises–Fisher distribution; family allowance; Wright–Fisher model; Ancillary statistic; Fiducial inference; Intraclass correlation; Infinitesimal model; Inverse probability; Lady tasting tea; Null hypothesis; Maximum likelihood estimation; Neutral theory of molecular evolution; Particulate inheritance; p-value; Random effects model; Relative species abundance; Reproductive value; Sexy son hypothesis; Sufficient statistic; Analysis of variance; Variance
That's a pretty long list of achievements.
Because he (mostly single-handedly) invented modern statistics.
Gelman comes down pretty hard on Fisher here but he doesn't question his brilliance.
Whenever group-think is this loud, it’s a huge red flag we should crack open the raw data ourselves. Fisher wasn’t some mustache-twirling villain, just a stubborn contrarian pushing against the orthodoxy. And if Big Tobacco slipped him a check, that doesn’t automatically nuke his math.
Correlation hype is easy, real causation proof is hard, and I’d love to see all the data and methodology. We don’t push science forward by chanting from the same hymn book. We do it by asking hard, unpopular questions.
It's not enough to be a contrarian, you also have to be right. Acknowledging that cigarettes are bad isn't "group think", it's an easy consensus because the evidence at every level, scientific, personal is very clear. Just walk up a bunch of stairs with a heavy smoker.
People who constantly act contrarian because they cannot accept that orthodox opinions are, most of the time, established opinion for decent reasons are both annoying and especially these days a blight on public discourse. They don't move science forward (forward progress is by definition only possible if matters are, at some point, actually settled instead of repeated for eternity), they try to get attention by standing out.
And of course companies tend to use these people because they can easily become useful idiots, it's no surprise that there's an entire cottage industry of "heterodox thinkers" these days. The book in the article, Merchants of Doubt, gives some great examples on this in regards to pollution and climate change denial.
What stops you from looking at it?
The alternative theory I've heard is that there are secondary benefits to moderate consumption of cigarettes (moderate in this case being three to five per day) due to appetite suppression and creation of a 3rd place accessible during working hours. Some would also suggest that, at least in institutional environments (hospitals, universities, corporate campuses and manufacturing facilities), the food court/cafeteria and the accompanying array of fast food have replaced the cigarette break.
In this view, we haven't really solved any problems. We've just shifted the damage into a form that society finds to be more palatable. What if we could bring back the cigarette break and in the process boost people's community engagement, mental health and significantly reduce the obesity epidemic all in one hrrrm...
TL:DR; The way that most tobacco is produced causes it to contain Polonium-210. Can we at least agree that putting Polonium-210 into the human body is not great?
Click the first link from 1964, look up the dosage in rems. Then look up the lethality of that amount of radiation, noting that the effects of radiation are largely cumulative.
If you want to find something actually interesting in all of this, read this piece about this industry reaction.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18633078/
Or, generally try to learn where the Polonium appears to come from in the process. That is super interesting and also covered in those google results.
It's no different than insisting that belief in a drug's efficacy rests on RCTs. I'm legitimately unfamiliar with polonium ingestion trials so I don't have a justification for believing that it is harmful.
I want to be very clear that I'm not arguing that polonium isn't harmful - I believe it is. I just don't have justification for that belief. I believe that it's important to understand the difference between true beliefs and justified true beliefs.
Which part do you see as an unjustified belief?
Yet even if I read RCT results concluding polonium to be harmless, I would distrust that conclusion, not my understanding.
Somehow we're doing this epistemology thing differently. It feels to me like you live in a world of impossibly high standards. Or you just like to argue hypotheticals.