Yet another Hacker News

45 points timpera 1 hour ago 21 comments

dekhn 1 hour ago | parent

Cancer risk associations studies are not normally described as "proving" anything. The article being criticized uses 'risk' and 'association'. There is a long history of argument around these sorts of studies, there was a previous series of these around people living near power plants (where it seems like SES, not plant proximity, was the strongest explanatory variable, see https://www.aps.org/archives/publications/apsnews/200710/ele... ). I've seen similar "living near a freeway causes cancer" arguments. There was a massive court case by flight attendants, who have a higher rate of cancer than the regular population.

In reading the criticism, I noticed the authors keep using the term "prove" and they also keep trying to come up with mechanisms ("refueling of the plant"). Even the argument about plant worker exposure compared to people living far away doesn't completely work, because the plant workers are taking all sorts of precautions to minimize exposure to radiation, but there are still mechanisms where something could go out the cooling stacks and deliver something harmful downwind.

The biophysics of cancer causation is entirely nontrivial and looking for the actual sources of the cancer risk is challenging, and watching physics people argue with epidemiologists gets old quickly (my field is biophysics, and I've had a few physics people insist that non-ionizing radiation couldn't possibly cause cancer, "because it doesn't damage DNA". Unfortunately, that argument isn't good, because it presupposes a mechanism (DNA damage due to radiation); we know now that non-ionizing radiation causes cellular heating, stress response, and more, which are all associated (based mostly on in vitro studies) with increased rate of cancer.

Note the authors (and the institute they work for) have vested interest: Dr. Adam Stein is the Director of the Nuclear Energy Innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute, where his work centers on the technology, regulation, economics, and risk governance of advanced nuclear energy.

Deric Tilson is a Senior Nuclear Energy Innovation Analyst at The Breakthrough Institute, where he focuses on advancing nuclear energy as a critical pathway to a carbon-free and energy-abundant future.

barney54 29 minutes ago | parent

Do Tilson and Stein have more or less of a vested interest than the people who wrote the studies they are criticizing? It’s not obvious to me that they are more (or less) conflicted.

dekhn 15 minutes ago | parent

I could go on a long rant on how sociologists, pyschologists, and epidemiologists all play games with data to support their own pet theories and causes, but I won't.

To answer your question: without other data, generally I would expect a person who works for an industry supporting institute to have greater vested interest than academics working at a university- academics mainly just want to get more funding for their individual research, while the industry is dealing with multi-billion-dollar industries and they get paid well to write articles like this. But now that I look carefully, I don't think their institute is funded directly by the nuclear power/plant industry.

toast0 27 minutes ago | parent

> there was a previous series of these around people living near power plants (where it seems like SES, not plant proximity, was the strongest explanatory variable, see https://www.aps.org/archives/publications/apsnews/200710/ele... ). I've seen similar "living near a freeway causes cancer" arguments.

Social Economic Status is certainly associated with all sorts of things, but being near a freeway means being near brake dust (which used to have asbestos), being near all sorts of tailpipe nasties, being near tire dust, etc. I'd be surprised if it was all explained by money.

dekhn 11 minutes ago | parent

See- you immediately went to a mechanism that justified the result. It's all too easy to convince yourself something is true because you can see a pathway- yet that pathway might not matter.

msteffen 19 minutes ago | parent

My understanding was that they take issue with the word "attributable". They don't attempt to propose a mechanism by which living near Costco causes cancer (the most strongly associated of the landmarks they measured). Rather, the implication is that it doesn't. Like I think it's a lot of words arguing that "correlation doesn't prove causation" could be restated "association doesn't prove attribution."

dekhn 4 minutes ago | parent

Attributable risk is a specific term in epi, the FDA uses it, and it doesn't imply causality.

codeonline 19 minutes ago | parent

I thought the papers author's nearly ten year employment at `Petrofac` is interesting and probably warrents a mention.

> Petrofac designs, builds, manages and maintains oil, gas, refining, petrochemicals and renewable energy infrastructure.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/profile/yazan-alwadi/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yazan-alwadi-ab1b112b/

forgetfreeman 38 minutes ago | parent

There was a time when encountering truly naked propaganda was something of a rarity. Clearly those days are behind us.

fwipsy 29 minutes ago | parent

Are you referring to the original study, or the rebuttal article?

fliglr 36 minutes ago | parent

I like this article: Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review (https://www.cold-takes.com/does-x-cause-y-an-in-depth-eviden...)

solenoid0937 31 minutes ago | parent

I love seeing quacks get shredded by articles like this.

YPPH 24 minutes ago | parent

Me too, but how many quacks are going to read it? And if they do, cancel their Costco membership?

dekhn 9 minutes ago | parent

Who is the quack here? Did you take this criticism article as being absolutely true? I found their argument unconvincing (I am not really qualified to judge the original paper; running a good epi study is hard, and interpreting the results even harder.

hatthew 19 minutes ago | parent

Did I miss it, or do the authors not bother to explain how the original methodology is wrong? Do we just take their word for it?

barney54 14 minutes ago | parent

Do you think Costco really is associated with 2.2 million deaths?

hatthew 11 minutes ago | parent

No, but how do I know that the authors used the same methodology? The most they say about it is "we developed our own methodology by guessing what they did, and we changed stuff around until the results from our methodology matched their results", which is very unconvincing to me.

bjourne 17 minutes ago | parent

"Over the last several months, we have replicated the results of these papers. The authors supplied us with eight lines of code and answered a couple of questions about the covariates, which did not replicate the results. Most of our replication was done through first principles combined with trial and error. Once we were reasonably close to the results of the first national study on cancer mortality, we took the methodology and applied it to numerous other landmarks."

Author implies that Alwadi et al. was not forthcoming with sharing the data underlying their studies. Because otherwise they should be able to exactly replicate their results. "Reasonably close" does not cut it.

fliglr 16 minutes ago | parent

I started noticing awhile ago that you seem to have this pipeline in scientific/academic reporting that goes academic paper -> press release -> science journalists -> regular journalists -> Facebook/Reddit.

Even if the original authors never say anything about causation, inevitably the language of correlation (related to, is linked to, associated with, correlated with, coincides with, etc.) will turn into the language of causation (leads to, increases/decreases, has an effect on, causes, etc.) somewhere in this pipeline.

Then suddenly everybody around you is talking about how going to bed with shoes on causes headaches, or goes playing tennis increases longevity. There is some atrocious science journalism out there