A letter to a statistician. Emailed and airmailed and no reply

A letter to a statistician. Emailed and airmailed and no reply

http://members.iinet.com.au/~ray/DeVeaux.htm:

Professor R.D. De Vaux,

Bronfman Science Center,

Williams College,

Williamstown, MA01267

Dear Professor De Veaux,

In your book "Intro Stats", you say (p126) "Ironically, the proof
that smoking indeed is the cause of many cancers came from
experiments conducted following the principles of experimental
design and analysis that Fisher himself developed - and that
we?ll see in Chapter 13." Chapter 13 is about controlled
intervention trials. Seven such trials have been conducted
to determine the association between smoking and health, with
a hundred thousand test and control subjects followed for seven
years - Whitehall, MRFIT, Goteburg, Finnish Businessmen, Oslo,
WHO collaborative and North Karelia. (References are available
on my website.) The results of all are uniform, forthright and
unequivocal: they show no association between smoking and life
expectancy, deaths from cancer or deaths from any other cause.
The "proof" that smoking causes cancer and other diseases comes
from trials of the kind Fisher had condemned - uncontrolled,
nonrandomised, nonintervention trials such as the British Doctors
and American Cancer Society studies: it is these which have been
used to calculate the number of deaths supposedly caused by
smoking.

For real irony read the words of A.B. Hill, a principal author
of the British Doctors study. On p250 of his Principles of Medical
Statistics" (1971) he uses the words "inferior" and "second-best"
to describe such work. But perhaps that is more hypocrisy than
irony.

This is surely a unique episode. So far as I am aware,
nowhere in medical science are the results of controlled
intervention trials rejected in favour of uncontrolled
non-intervention trials. But it is more than unique.
It is scandalous.

It is clear that Fisher loved the science of statistics.
He would have been appalled to witness a generation of
statisticians degrade that science.

Yours sincerely

Ray Johnstone
.

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