Re:Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
by bigcohoneypot on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:58PM
(#22028794)
You don't think this is an example where industry threw shade and we could have concluded this much earlier?
Re:Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
by DubiousPusher on Sunday January 12, 2020 @08:03PM
(#22031010)
Genuinely no. Mostly I think the industry failed to corrupt the scientific process. Their attempts to do so were nakedly transparent. And they absolutely preyed upon the fact that real quality scientists were reluctant to definitively say the link was causal because they were being diligent about the fact that there was a preponderance of evidence that was correlative.
They succeeded in corrupting the political process though. I don't think you should need 100% scientific certainty to begin regulatory action. Maybe 80% or 90% of the way is good enough. The industry succeeded in requiring 150% certainty before a public health response could begin.
Huge surveys long showed a correlation between smokers and increased incidence of cancer. But it took decades of research to rule out confounding factors. For example, it may have been the case that industrial work was causing the cancer and industrial workers just happened to be more likely to be smokers.
There is one tool that really nails causation fairly quickly which is a double blind controlled experiment. But usually in social science it's very hard to or even immoral to conduct such experiments.
For example, assigning babies at random to be smokers or not for some period would be pretty hard to carry out and certainly be immoral if you thought the smoking may lead to cancer.