HeyJaredCarl V Phillips's epistemic musings
Sciencey and philosophy stuff by an epidemiologist/economist/philosopher of science/intellectual wanderer. Mostly about what might be called "methodology", though I will include some topic specific stuff including about tobacco harm reduction.
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- 5
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- Sep 18, 2026
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- Jul 23, 2026
Latest issues
My new paper: The limits of precision in risk-factor epidemiology, and some practical lessons in communicating it (opens the original)
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So my new paper with Igor Burstyn is out (open access). It is a methodology paper, but not mathy, and should be readable by anyone here. It is about why the levels of claimed precision in epidemiology (and for that matter, in most other social science papers, and in many natural science papers too) are deceptive. Reading the paper is no more demanding than a good long Substack post. It should be quite easy to understand the theses and offers some sidebar lessons about the need to quantify errors
Where does the consensus end and [author] begin? If you cannot figure this out, it is a epistemic red flag. (opens the original)
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I was recently trying to teach my son wariness about a certain genre of writing wherein the author is telling a story in support of some big-picture interpretation of scientific or historiographic evidence. The genre I refer to involves a complex body of evidence, which usually means there are multiple interpretations of the evidence, and the author is presenting a conclusion that is big-if-true innovative which is usually heterodox. My warning was about instances of this genre where every sente
In which I am brought low by the Mandela Effect, perhaps twice, with a side of Baader–Meinhof (opens the original)
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Is nicotine good for you? Part 1.5 - the social welfare losses of restricting and vilifying nicotine (opens the original)
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This is not quite the next part of the series I recently started, in which I will plan to start to analyze the question I defined, “Does long-term consumption of typical quantities of nicotine, not considering any effects of the delivery system, have net positive or negative effects on the overall risk for chronic real disease for the average person?” The “chronic real disease” bit was doing the work of excluding from consideration short-term benefits and costs, as well as non-disease potential
Is nicotine good for you? (opens the original)
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This is not one of those times where the headline is phrased as a question to be mere clickbait before conceding that the default “no” answer seems to be right after all. Neither is it a rhetorical trick by an author who wants to lie (deliberately delivering a message they believe to be false) without making a concrete false statement (by making it a question instead). Based on what we currently have reason to believe and predictable refinements thereof, my assessment is that the answer to the q
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