How can a top scientist be so confidently wrong? R. A. Fisher and smoking (2022)
67 comments
·January 16, 2025sonofhans
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.
snakeyjake
>The article also throws shade at him as a “eugenicist.” I looked it up, and again, the truth is more complex.
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.
bumby
>you are a eugenicist.
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)
reverendsteveii
It's possible that he changed his mind but realistically we can only entertain that possibility in the face of some pretty strong evidence given his earlier statements and actions. It's not technically impossible that he grew a horn out of the middle of his forehead either, but much like his views on genetics things we know for sure to be true make it reasonable to assume that this didn't happen unless someone can present a really compelling case that it did.
pessimizer
> 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.
sonofhans
Oh, I looked him up just fine. I’m not trying to defend the man, or write a full biography. I hoped that providing some background to this awful article would further the discussion. So thank you :)
baryphonic
>>Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes
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.
gowld
More clarity on the slippery slope from eugenics to genocide, despite the existence of a theoretical morally-defensible version of non-genocidal, consensual eugenics: https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014/
gowld
Modern connotations of the word "miscegenation aside" aside (the word's denotation means "mixing of races", which is exactly the correct terminology for the issue), and laying aside modern understanding of "race" vs "ethnicity", in Fisher's era racial separatism was considered a solution to racism, not only by White people but also by many leading Black rights activists, such as Malcom X and Muhammad Ali in the Nation of Islam. Ethnonationalism may well be a bad idea in theory or or practice, but it's not purely an oppressor's idea. (It's not obvious that there is any unalloyed good solution to racism and human nature.)
https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/mxp/speeches/mxt14....
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/06/10/481414008...
defrost
It was common enough at the time to hold the opinion that "mixing of the races" resulted in offspring that were worse than either race.
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.
delichon
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.
andrewla
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?
jldugger
Here is Fisher, in a letter to the editors of _Nature_ (perhaps the most prestigious journal imaginable) "Cancer and Smoking"[1]:
> 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.
slibhb
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.
nritchie
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.
jfengel
Nobelists are so prone to it that Wikipedia has a page dedicated to it:
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.
tivert
> It's hardly limited to Nobel laureates.
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.
reverendsteveii
This was my brother's theory on why Steve Jobs didn't use traditional cancer treatments. The way he explained it to me was "Put yourself in his place: your whole life every time everyone said you were wrong about something and it was gonna destroy you you did it anyway and made a billion dollars. This time they were right and he was wrong but you can't blame him for playing the odds one last time."
thaumasiotes
> 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.
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?
michaelmrose
No because it was medical as well. Anyone who thought it was purely statistical was by that thought alone unqualified
michaelmrose
Elon is only an authority in the topic of raising money and mostly not trashing the work of the better men whose work he buys when he correctly infers he doesn't know enough.
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.
Gibbon1
This idea for me comes from a friend that does patent law. He said the hard thing about a patent is knowing what questions need to be answered. Not the answers. It's all about framing the problem, all the hard hard is really there.
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.
Remnant44
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.
contingencies
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
selimthegrim
Sounds like Ted Turner needed to change the end of the world video on CNN.
robwwilliams
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.
just_steve_h
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.
DAGdug
Can you provide evidence of this strong claim? It looks like you’re conflating his population genetics work with eugenics/race science (which in turn have significant differences that I won’t go into).
Tryk
>There is much to learn from considering this reality
Like what?
johnea
> 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...
PittleyDunkin
Does it even need to be that analytical? Conservatism can also also be general skepticism of change. And I don't know if you've ever tried to quit nicotine before but it's very good at convincing you it's a relatively harmless habit that helps cope with all sorts of stress and anxiety. If you're already inclined to be generally skeptical of change, smoking would slot right in there.
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.
renewiltord
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.
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).