by Why the father of modern statistics — R A Fisher — denied smoking causes cancer In 1959, Fisher denounced his colleagues for manufacturing anti-smoking “propaganda” … He did not dispute that smoking and lung cancer tended to rise and fall together—that is, that they were correlated. But Hill and Doll and the entire British medical establishment had committed “an error … of an old kind, in arguing from correlation to causation,” he wrote in a letter to Nature … Most researchers had evaluated the association between smoking and cancer and concluded that the former caused the latter. But what if the opposite were true? For a time, many of Fisher’s peers in academic statistics, including Jerzy Neyman, questioned the validity of a causal claim. But before
Topics:
Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Statistics & Econometrics
This could be interesting, too:
Lars Pålsson Syll writes What statistics teachers get wrong!
Lars Pålsson Syll writes Statistical uncertainty
Lars Pålsson Syll writes The dangers of using pernicious fictions in statistics
Lars Pålsson Syll writes Interpreting confidence intervals
Why the father of modern statistics — R A Fisher — denied smoking causes cancer
In 1959, Fisher denounced his colleagues for manufacturing anti-smoking “propaganda” … He did not dispute that smoking and lung cancer tended to rise and fall together—that is, that they were correlated. But Hill and Doll and the entire British medical establishment had committed “an error … of an old kind, in arguing from correlation to causation,” he wrote in a letter to Nature …
Most researchers had evaluated the association between smoking and cancer and concluded that the former caused the latter. But what if the opposite were true?
For a time, many of Fisher’s peers in academic statistics, including Jerzy Neyman, questioned the validity of a causal claim. But before long, the majority buckled under the weight of mounting evidence and overwhelming consensus …
In his review of the debate, the epidemiologist Paul Stolley lambasts Fisher for being “unwilling to seriously examine the data and to review all the evidence before him to try to reach a judicious conclusion.” According to Stolley, Fisher undermined Hill and Doll’s conclusions by cherry picking irregular findings and blowing them out of proportion … Others have offered less charitable interpretations … even [suggesting] that his skepticism had been bought. The Tobacco Manufacturers’ Committee had agreed to fund Fisher’s research into possible genetic causes of both smoking and lung cancer. And though it seems unlikely that a man who routinely insulted his peers and jeopardized his career in order to prove that he was right would sell his professional opinion at such an old age, some still regard him as doing so.
If Fisher wasn’t swayed by money, it seems more likely that he was influenced by politics.
Throughout his life, Fisher was an unflinching reactionary. In 1911, while studying at Cambridge, he helped found the university’s Eugenics Society. Though many well-educated English men of the day embraced this ideology, Fisher took to the issue with an unusual fervency. Throughout his career, he intermittently wrote papers on the subject. A particular concern of Fisher’s was that upper class families were having fewer children than their poorer and less educated counter-parts. At one point, he suggested that the government pay “intelligent” couples to procreate … These political leanings may have colored his views on smoking.