Continuing Causality Woes: Smoking and Lung Cancer:
Looking at:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/cc8/seq_rerun_changing_the_definition_of_science/
and
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Smoking_lesion
Cross Referenced with Causation in the Presence of Weak Associations: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024843/
WHY IS IT SO OFTEN REPEATED THAT SMOKING CAUSES CANCER? I'm not a tobacco user, so I'm not trying to justify my behavior. Has anyone here looked into the other things tobacco's accused of causing or being "strongly" correlated with?
Background reading:
-Anything by David Hume
-Carl G. Hempel. Laws and Their Role in Scientific Explanation: http://www.scribd.com/doc/19536968/Carl-G-Hempel-Laws-and-Their-Role-in-Scientific-Explanation
-Studies in the Logic of Explanation: http://www.sfu.ca/~jillmc/Hempel%20and%20Oppenheim.pdf
-Causation as Folk Science: http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/003004.pdf
-Causation: The elusive grail of epidemiology: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1009970730507
-Causality and the Interpretation of Epidemiologic Evidence: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1513293/
-Studies in the Philosophy of Biology: Reduction and Related Problems: http://books.google.com/books?id=NMAf65cDmAQC&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false
Smoking is not "accused" of being strongly correlated with negative outcomes. It is strongly correlated with negative outcomes, as a simple empirical fact. This is a statement about the joint distribution of the observed variables "smoking" and "negative outcomes", and it has nothing to do with causal inference. I cannot even imagine a scenario where the statement "Smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer" is false, short of a vast conspiracy among scientists and doctors
A slightly more interesting question ...
You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.