I would suggest rewriting the smoking lesion problem to simply be about something else; the original medical claim it’s based on has since been thoroughly disproven and as a result reading that section is difficult due to the additional layer of inversions to track. This is an ongoing confusion right now and hopefully someday the field will stop calling it that and we’ll stop needing to remind each other to do this, but for now, here’s this feedback.
In Pearl’s “The Book of Why”, he mentions that in 2008 they found a gene that has this causal effect (influences both risk of smoking and lung cancer). Of course the effect is much smaller than the direct effect of smoking on cancer, it’s just a funny fact.
I would suggest rewriting the smoking lesion problem to simply be about something else; the original medical claim it’s based on has since been thoroughly disproven and as a result reading that section is difficult due to the additional layer of inversions to track. This is an ongoing confusion right now and hopefully someday the field will stop calling it that and we’ll stop needing to remind each other to do this, but for now, here’s this feedback.
In Pearl’s “The Book of Why”, he mentions that in 2008 they found a gene that has this causal effect (influences both risk of smoking and lung cancer). Of course the effect is much smaller than the direct effect of smoking on cancer, it’s just a funny fact.