> eventually converged on "smoking causes lung cancer", even though that wasn't agreed upon at the beginning because monied interests disagreed. tangential "Fu

> eventually converged on "smoking causes lung cancer", even though that wasn't agreed upon at the beginning because monied interests disagreed. tangential "Fun fact": The origin of the phrase "correlation does not imply correlation" comes from Ronald Fisher, the father of frequentist statistics, defending tobacco companies. It's unknown by many people but Fisher was an aggressive shill for tobacco in his day and argued that the strong correlation between smoking and lung cancer was not adequate statistical evidence to show any relationship. Fisher, to this day, being one of the most respected minds in statistics held a lot of weight with his opinions and is very likely a major reason why it took decades for legislation to make any progresses in this area. As a stats person it's one reason I really hate that phrase. Of course there are events that have correlation without causation, however the XKCD hidden text [0] is a much more accurate phrasing: > "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'." https://xkcd.com/552/ https://xkcd.com/552/