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

Fisher’s Brilliance vs. Fallibility

• Many emphasize Fisher’s extraordinary impact on modern statistics and genetics, listing a large number of concepts and methods that bear his name.
• Others push back against “great man” narratives, arguing discoveries are often inevitable and over-crediting individuals distorts history.
• A middle view: individuals can be genuinely brilliant and still make severe errors; brilliance raises the average quality of reasoning but doesn’t prevent outliers that are “boneheadedly wrong.”

Why a Top Scientist Can Be Deeply Wrong

• Suggested factors: financial incentives, ideological alignment, identity (e.g. as a smoker or conservative), and the overconfidence that comes from a lifetime of being right.
• One recurring theme: smart people are especially good at rationalizing desired beliefs, including contrarian positions.
• Some argue that once someone is speaking from greed or ideology rather than reasoning, we should stop treating them as “brilliant” in that context.

Debate Over Smoking Evidence and Causality

• Most commenters treat smoking’s harms as overwhelmingly established, and see contrarianism here as misplaced and often exploited by industry.
• A minority voice questions the intensity of anti-smoking consensus and calls for re‑examining raw data and methods, including possible benefits of very light use (e.g. appetite suppression, social function).
• There is a meta‑debate on epistemic standards: whether believing polonium-laden smoke is harmful requires RCT-level proof, or whether established radiation biology suffices.

Genetics, Statistics, and Fisher’s Specific Claims

• Fisher’s core argument is summarized as: a genetic predisposition could both increase smoking and lung cancer risk, creating correlation without smoking being causal.
• It’s noted that such genes do exist, but later work argued their effect size is far too small to explain the observed association.
• Fisher is criticized for clinging to one early finding about inhalation and for underweighting accumulating contrary evidence.

Eugenics and Moral Evaluation

• Thread documents Fisher’s deep early involvement in organized eugenics and argues this justifies calling him a eugenicist.
• Others point to later statements supporting equal rights but opposing racial mixing, debating whether his views evolved and how much that matters.
• Broader context: eugenics and racial separatism were mainstream among many early‑20th‑century elites, but also directly tied to racist policies and worse.

Meta: Expertise, Hubris, and Forum Norms

• Several parallels are drawn to other eminent scientists and technologists who later made confident but dubious claims in unrelated domains (“Nobel disease,” “engineer’s disease”).
• Commenters stress that expertise is domain-limited and that success can breed hubris.
• Significant subthread about HN moderation and tone: how to correct factual errors without personal swipes, and why strict norms exist to avoid flamewars.