I know a lot about rationality and bayesian logic, researched them to a great degree some research on statistics has become part of that.

What i've been wondering or thinking about is; Wouldn't the general statistics say on smoking/tobacco use causing or increasing the risk of cancer be a bit skewed? Considering that none of these researches to my knowledge include the statistic's priors (individual priors)wouldn't that make the general statistics a bit less accurate in general?

Public policy and science have been becoming increasingly elastic, for an example the idea that second hand smoke causes lung cancer has been the basis of banning public smoking.

This research has been thoroughly and scientificly crushed time and time again, and the EPA has been charged by federal judges for "coming to conclusions before research even began" The evidence they used to suggest this was openly bunk science, and WHO did massive country wide studies that found no correlations between second hand smoke and lung cancer (Nor to my knowledge has any objective scientific study to date, but i'm not completely up-to-date)

Yet its pretty much 'common knowledge' that SH smoke causes lung cancer, to get accurate statistics which are openly given now, wouldn't they need to take a lot more factors into play then they currently do?

Hi Amarjudas

There are Facts and Propaganda. Some positions receive funding and publicity, others don't. So what you are lead to believe is not necessarily fact. And if enough people think it is so, it becomes FACT! It happens with SH smoke, the greenhouse effect, etc. Many members on the Message Board who have had a mouth cancer have never smoked.

You know more about statistics than I do, so how would you like to rearch the statistics behind smoking and mouth cancers so that we can be rational about the risk?

Best wishes
Vinod

quote:

Originally posted by Dr Vinod K Joshi:
Hi Amarjudas

There are Facts and Propaganda. Some positions receive funding and publicity, others don't. So what you are lead to believe is not necessarily fact. And if enough people think it is so, it becomes FACT! It happens with SH smoke, the greenhouse effect, etc. Many members on the Message Board who have had a mouth cancer have never smoked.

You know more about statistics than I do, so how would you like to rearch the statistics behind smoking and mouth cancers so that we can be rational about the risk?

Best wishes
Vinod

Yes things become 'fact' and somtimes the consequences are deadly, say with the demonization and overblown irrational fears about the use of 1,1,1-TRICHLORO-2,2-bis (p-CHLOROPHENYL)-ETHANE to control insect pests. Banning the use resulted in the deaths of millions of foreign children from malaria, and frankly, no one really cared.

I think to be rational about the risks we'd need to take into account some very specific factors involved in each case, individual priors comes high on the list, needless to say this would be a massive under-taking which would probably require substancial funding and minds working together to align all this information together

also I can see some complications with this because of some of the gaps in knowledge with human understanding about cancer in general. Objective scientific study and research that takes into account more factors then are currently being applied might make a clearer and more accurate study.

On a more personal level its a bit difficult to pinpoint where someone can be more rational about the chances of getting cancer, if the research hasn't been done taking into account important factors, or if there is complications in doing the research because of gaps in human knowledge about why cancer developes the way it does it provides a very impassable and tall wall between us and our complete understanding. I mean, even a persons genetic make-up comes into play.

Needless to say that i'm sure tobacco use and alcohol consumption are significant risk factors, but without taking into account other personal factors, and there may even been some that are unknowns I think the information they give out is quite a bit out of whack.

I mean what they say is good in the way that it makes people think twice about consuming known carcinogens, whats really really not good however is the public's inability to diffrentiate between legitimate science and garbage. (The mind is made up of connatural particularized learning mechanisms which evolved in pleistocene hunter/gatherer societies for organizing experience into adaptively significant stratagems, not towards rational or abstract reasoning, so unfortunately it is an inability for a lot of people)

If trends like this continue proper objective scientific studies, things that give us a true understanding of the way things work might become less and less funded in favor of 'what sounds good to us' opposed to whats real. Without this prevention methods may be overlooked, its an important issue that unfortunately doesn't get much public evaluation. General statistics like that though must be a lot more useless than they come across as.

Biology is a huge area of interest to me, from evolutionary to genetic and everything inbetween, if I go deeply into pure biology instead of cognitive sciences I plan to deeply research cancer issues and learn what sort of factors need to be taken into account, though forming any statistics on a generalized level would be hard unless I had massive collection of people working on it, luckily, there is no lack of scientists doing lots of research.

What I can say with some certainty and I don't mean to give out false hope is this: With the current rate of technological advancement and medical knowledge, the current rate of that very rate increasing (which is a pessimistic outlook because the very rate of increase has been getting faster and faster) Cancer might just be obsolete within a decade.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Amarjudas,

now if we could only stay cancer free for another 10 years, we could get off scot free.