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How can a top scientist be so confidently wrong? R. A. Fisher and smoking (2022)

by tchalla on 1/16/25, 7:49 PM with 114 comments

  • by sonofhans on 1/16/25, 8:26 PM

    This isn’t a random crank we’re talking about. Robert Fisher is widely acknowledge as one of the foremost scientists in the last 100 years. His contributions to statistics alone would earn him that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher

    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.

  • by Remnant44 on 1/16/25, 8:29 PM

    This is my favorite passage from the article:

    "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.

  • by slibhb on 1/16/25, 9:21 PM

    For some people at that time, smoking was a non-trivial part of their identity. Or even a significant part of what it meant to be a proper Englishman (that and tea). Fisher strikes me as that sort, just look at pictures of him.

    The (fairly obvious) lesson here is that people lose their objectivity when it comes to fighting over stuff that involves their identity.

  • by robwwilliams on 1/16/25, 9:20 PM

    Fisher’s main scientific and statistical argument boils down to the possibility that gene variants that contribute to lung cancer are tightly linked with gene variants that make nicotine more or less addicting. By “linked with” he meant “close together on the same chromosome”. This kind of linkage can lead to strong a statistical association but without a mechanistic association (guilt by neighborhood).

    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.

  • by eviks on 1/17/25, 5:06 AM

    Why would you expect anything else? Becoming "a top scientist" doesn't turn you into some non-human intelligent entity without flaws for the rest of your life, it just means you've done some notable scientific work in some areas. And that work doesn't even have to be correct! You could've been a top scientist with later top (or even low) scientists invalidating all your top science work

  • by andrewla on 1/16/25, 8:31 PM

    As far as I can tell the only reference to something that Fisher said was a clip from a newspaper article where he said that criticizing smoking was terrorism. The rest appears to just be other contemporary evidence that the cigarette execs knew it was bad but some scientists (not Fisher?) didn't believe that it was bad.

    Am I missing something -- does this article spell out to what extent Fisher himself defended smoking?

  • by renewiltord on 1/16/25, 8:29 PM

    One aspect that modern finance has laid clear is the concept of monetization of various assets one possesses. In the past, it wasn't clear that one's brand was monetizable or how one could do that. Individuals would happen upon these now and then, even if it wasn't systematized. The most obvious answer is that R. A. Fisher happened upon a way to monetize his brand in a way that aligned with his politics: he was a good statistician, and therefore people believed him, but the value of "being a good statistician and known to be so" is much higher than just being a good statistician and this was one such thing where he could extract more value. The part about aligned politics is that it helps when you're trading reputation.

    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.

  • by contingencies on 1/16/25, 8:12 PM

    See quotes in my profile.

    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

  • by delichon on 1/16/25, 8:34 PM

    I think Ancel Keys is in this category, and we are still suffering and dying from his opinions, which are a leading reason for the upside down food pyramid. I don't doubt his sincerity or intelligence at all. He's just an instance of how badly top scientists can get it wrong with the best of intentions, and how enormously expensive such failures can be.

  • by nritchie on 1/16/25, 8:39 PM

    You see this time and time again. A scientist/mathematician/technological leader who thinks because they are the "cat's pajamas" in one field that they are equipped to chime in on another. One example is John Clauser, Nobel winning physicist, making a downright embarrassing attempt to "debunk climate change." (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kGiCUiOMyQ) Another is Elon Musk, who seems to have an opinion on everything. Sometimes there is money or malice involved -often just hubris.

  • by d--b on 1/16/25, 8:24 PM

    I have a friend who really got into studying people who buy into conspiracy theories.

    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.

  • by EA-3167 on 1/16/25, 8:15 PM

    This comes off as borderline hagiography, when the answer is pretty clear. People figured out that chronic smoking was bad for you a LONG time ago, the reason that understanding was undermined rebutted had nothing to do with science, and everything to do with money.

  • by just_steve_h on 1/16/25, 8:36 PM

    R. A. Fisher developed many of the foundational techniques of modern statistics in an attempt to support his odious beliefs in “racial hierarchy.”

    There is much to learn from considering this reality, but most will dismiss it as irrelevant.

  • by Mathnerd314 on 1/16/25, 10:57 PM

    It's kind of the same situation with alcohol now: a lot of people denouncing it, the alcohol industry throwing a lot of shade, and top scientists making confident pronouncements (on both sides).

  • by johnea on 1/16/25, 8:39 PM

    > for whatever reason, cigarettes were a conservative cause

    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...

  • by fancyfredbot on 1/17/25, 11:27 AM

    See also James Watson, Nobel winner for discovering DNA, who continues to make racist remarks despite scientific evidence that he's incorrect. This has unsurprisingly led to the complete destruction of his reputation and considerable loss of income. People don't need financial incentives to be wrong, apparently.

  • by jldugger on 1/17/25, 4:41 PM

  • by dwattttt on 1/16/25, 8:16 PM

    > But then this just pushes the question back one step: How could this brilliant statistician be so naive?

    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?

  • by senderista on 1/16/25, 8:38 PM

    See also Serge Lang on HIV/AIDS.

  • by orf on 1/16/25, 8:24 PM

    Money. Obviously.

  • by kelseyfrog on 1/16/25, 8:25 PM

    I’m honestly baffled by how swiftly everyone demonizes cigarettes as the ultimate evil, as if that’s a done deal.

    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.