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The history of “How to Lie with Smoking Statistics” (2014)
- carlmr 8y ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
- a2tech 8y agoI wonder what his book would look like if published today. Would he still find big problems with the smoking studies?
- Arnt 8y agoI doubt it. Finding problems in e.g. a small-sample, 22-month study is one thing, finding problems in studies that cover entire nations over several decades is quite another.
- vectorEQ 8y agopoint to 1 such study on smoking, where they did actual measurements on an entire nation. i bet you they just sampled a subset and called it statistically sound. ;D
- Arnt 8y agoCan't. I heard that when I was a conscientous objector at the university hospital in Trondheim, Norway. One of the physicians there told me that they'd done statistics on all patients. Norway has a single-payer system, so that would really be all patients. But it's a while ago and I can't find email addresses for anyone whose name I still remember, so I can't.
- vectorEQ 8y agoall patients and 'nation' seems a bit overconfident of said doctor (even though i respect their work a lot!)... i guess his world IS the hospital patients but vice versa i think the world or a nation includes (a lot) more than its hospital patients.
- Arnt 8y agoSo I looked, starting at fhi.no, and found quickly found several studies that use data based on either the Norwegian cancer registry, the cause-of-death registry or both. These aren't samples. The cause of death registry includes all deaths and the cancer registry includes everyone who's been diagnosed with cancer, even people who received no treatment. This means that studies that investigate e.g. cancer caused by smoking and use these data sources are nationwide rather than sampled.
- capnrefsmmat 8y agoDarrell Huff's style in How to Lie with Smoking Statistics was to marshal an army of minor quibbles to apparently undermine the entire body of research: find a small flaw in one study, a minor error in another, and pretty soon you've made it appear like all the research is flawed. He didn't need to actually prove any one study wrong. He also relied pretty heavily on arguments that correlation is not causation because smokers are genetically predisposed to smoke, and may also be predisposed to cancer and other maladies. He even quoted R.A. Fisher's argument that people smoke to quell irritation and annoyance, and having a chronic inflammation or cancer might just be the kind of irritation that makes you subconsciously want to smoke. No number of enormous well-conducted observational studies would prevent Huff from making up scenarios for other types of confounding. Check out Chapter 12 of the book.
- Gupie 8y agoYes, presumably he would, if he were paid enough. However he would probably writing on climate change.
- coldtea 8y agoOr about how GMOs and modern nuclear are perfectly safe.
- himlion 8y agoThose topics are way too broad to brush off in one sentence.
- whatshisface 8y agoHonestly, arguing over whether or not GMOs or nuclear plants are safe is a bit like asking whether or not powered flight is safe. You could be talking about anything from a fighter jet locked in a dogfight to a child's RC toy - or, less abstractly, anything from a contentious and ethical research group/engineering team to a corporation/government trapped in short term thinking, violently ignoring negative signs (I can't think of a good way to describe the corporate mentality of "sad words bad, happy words good" but it is out there), and pushing off every externality they can.
- coldtea 8y ago>anything from a contentious and ethical research group/engineering team to a corporation/government trapped in short term thinking, violently ignoring negative signs Well, in the real world, it's 99% the latter.
- scrollaway 8y agoOr perfectly unsafe. Unlike the somewhat-corporately-one-sided debates of climate change and tobacco, there's powerful interest groups on both sides of the nuclear/gmo debates. Be mindful of what you read, coldtea.
- 8y ago
- Udik 8y agoI'm not sure, but I have the impression that studies on passive smoking have been mostly debunked.
- efitz 8y agoI haven’t read the second book, does it misuse statistics to support the tobacco industry?
- usgroup 8y agoOh man ... how deeply disappointing.
- jackfrodo 8y agoIt's really insidious, to publish a book that establishes you as an intelligent truth teller, standing up to what marketers and profiteers want you to believe, and then use that success to shill for the worst consumer facing industry of the century.
- carlmr 8y agoEverybody needs money.
- auto 8y agoOne of my favorite movie lines of all time is Aaron Eckhart’s (who plays a lobbyist for the tobacco industry) line at the beginning of “Thank You For Smoking” where he introduces the doctor: “This is the man they rely on—Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany; I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius—he could disprove gravity.”
- mruts 8y agoIs there an established link between nicotine and (lung) cancer? I wasn't aware of one. Of course there is an established link between tobacco use and lung cancer, but that's an entirely different thing. Of the studies that I've seen, nicotine actually is quite healthy and has many upsides: increased working memory and recall, preventive against dementia and parkinson's, and a mild mood stabilizer/anti-psychotic.
- biofox 8y agoNicotine certainly isn't anywhere near as harmful as other compounds in tobacco, but it is known to promote cell proliferation and angiogenesis, both of which contribute to the growth and spread of malignant cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Cancer
- gwbas1c 8y agoNicotine is extremely addictive. This is what we're learning with vaping. And seriously, if you've ever smoked 2-3 packs of cigarettes and get weird desires to have a cigarette, you've experienced nicotine's addicting qualities. It's so subtle at first that most people just don't realize they're addicted.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sithadmin 8y ago>nicotine actually is quite healthy Though there are far worse compounds in tobacco, nicotine is hardly 'healthy' - it entails a number of undesirable side effects. Long term use induces negative cardiovascular conditions (with rather noticeable acute effects on heart rate, blood pressure, blood lipid profile, and blood circulation in the extremities), directly contributing to atherosclerosis and dramatically increasing the risk of heart attack, strokes, and blood clots. It negatively impacts adolescent brain development, and contributes to a variety of harmful neonatal and womens' reproductive issues. That isn't to say that it doesn't have value as a nootropic - I'm an occasional user exactly for that purpose. But spreading the false notion that nicotine is somehow a 'healthy' substance is at odds with medical science.
- mruts 8y agoHow to Lie with Statistics is such a great book. It's amazing how relevant it is seeing it's over 60 years old. The same lies that were being told then are being told today with statistics.
- amoorthy 8y agoThanks for the suggestion! Just reserved at my library to read after skimming a few pages online. Somewhat related, there's a great article in Mental Floss on the scientist who helped get rid of leaded fuel despite the industry's "scientific" pushback. Wonderful read. http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scienti...
- scrollaway 8y agoSeconding the recommendation. One of the most impactful books you can read for yourself. It's such a short and easy read, too (few hours; you can finish it within a day even if you're slow).
- umvi 8y agoPeople ultimately hear what they want to hear until evidence is so overwhelming to the contrary that it can no longer be ignored.
- adrianN 8y agoWhat's the copyright status of this work?
- capnrefsmmat 8y agoOf the article, or How to Lie with Smoking Statistics? The article is sadly owned by the journal, which does allow authors to post pre-prints on their personal sites. The book I'm not so sure about. I spent some time researching the copyright status back when I wrote the article, and the results were confusing. I don't think Huff ever registered copyright for How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, which was required at the time, but unpublished works were protected, and when the copyright system changed in the 70s unpublished works were given some statutory protections. The book only became public because of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which I haven't read but presumably sets some conditions on the documents it makes public. In the end I decided it was safest to link to the Tobacco Documents Library, though I was very tempted to typeset a new edition of the book so we could enjoy an example of corporate propaganda.
- mitchtbaum 8y agoCopyright is Brain Damage | Nina Paley | TEDxMaastricht https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Kurtz79 8y agoI was wondering as to why it was never published. From the linked article: "There are many possible explanations for the sudden demise of Huff’s book. The industry realized in 1968 that it had a credibility problem: the public was unlikely to trust a book funded and promoted by the Tobacco Institute. Perhaps the campaign was shelved after Tiderock closed up shop. Perhaps it was too late—some tobacco regulations had already been passed, others were inevitable, and new tactics were needed. Or perhaps the thought of legal trouble made them retract their offer to advertise the book, making Macmillan kill the project. But Macmillan was on the brink of signing a contract with Huff. Did they have second thoughts, or was Huff told to kill the project? Or were the Tiderock consultants correct in their assessment that “this mass of verbiage needs drastic editing” and was unpublishable without serious revision? The Documents Library offers no clues. Only documents produced or received by the industry are included, so any correspondence between Huff and Macmillan may not appear. Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University, reviewed the ethics of Huff’s involvement with the industry and suggested Huff could have intentionally killed the project to save his own reputation, which would have been destroyed by his association with tobacco.2 But just a few months before the book’s demise he had been fighting for a prestigious hardcover and better royalties. Whatever the reasons, How to Lie with Smoking Statistics went unpublished, protecting its better-known sibling How to Lie with Statistics from guilt by association." Would the original book have commanded the same respect, if associated with another which would bascially be an example of what the first was meaning to expose?
- bibyte 8y agoHere is another great article about statistics that was posted a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278839