I once TA'd an econometrics class for a fairly famous econometrician He pointed out to the students at one point that all of the studies linking cigarettes and cancer were correlational and just let it hang there for twenty seconds of uncomfortable silence before moving on
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He wasn't trying to make any obvious claim, and he didn't give any clue to what he meant to imply The effect was just to instill in students barely capable of running OLS in Stata, much less interpreting it, a sense of deep epistemic Dread I respect that and I hope it stuck
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Replying to @eigenrobot
tfw when the greatest statistician of the 20th century (and arguably greatest biologist too) didn't think smoking caused cancer
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Replying to @halvorz
or at least the case was unpersuasive :D idk I can see it tbh dont place a high probability on it but not zero
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Replying to @eigenrobot
I think his position was reasonable at the time. Not now -turns out I *can* be convinced by correlations sometimes.
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so what you're saying is that you now believe cancer causes smoking
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