How can a top scientist be so confidently wrong? R. A. Fisher and smoking (2022)
A landmark statistician’s defense of smoking, despite mounting evidence of its harms, prompts a broader look at how highly accomplished scientists can be confidently and persistently wrong. Commenters weigh explanations ranging from financial incentives and ideological bias to identity, hubris, and the limits of domain-specific expertise, drawing parallels to eugenics, climate denial, and other scientific misjudgments. The exchange also highlights how society overestimates the moral and epistemic reliability of “brilliant” individuals, and how that misplaced trust can be weaponized by industries seeking to manufacture doubt.
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.