Link: https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/things-that-apparently-cause-cancer

What does this methodology measure anyway?

Are we sure it’s a bogus methodology? It does confirm my bias that MLS is better than MLB

It would shock you to know that Costco, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health methodology, caused 120,687 cases of cancer mortality nationally every year, simply due to living in close proximity to their warehouses. Private colleges accounted for 83,782 more. Harvard itself is responsible for 5,842 cancer deaths. Living near a Major League Baseball field causes almost 19 times as many cancer deaths as living near a Major League Soccer pitch. These conclusions are obviously absurd, but they come from the exact same methodology that researchers at Harvard use to “prove” that nuclear power plants cause cancer in nearby communities.

So what's the actual causation here? If it's random noise it's not clear to me why these things have a positive association rather than negative.

They chose nuclear power plants because a story could be built around that framework.

I feel like the article authors critiquing the research don’t have a firm grasp on the basic scientific method… Ice cream is highly correlated with murder and whatnot. A hypothesis is supposed to be attached to a reasonable guess before it’s worth looking for mechanisms through which it might be a causal effect. Throwing statistics at the wall to look for any correlation and then reporting that correlation as your hypothesis is decidedly bad methodology and is quite frowned upon. We call incidental correlations spurious relations. X is spuriously related to Y rather than causing it. They teach you this in high school when they teach you the scientific method, it’s not high level stuff.

As best I can tell, the statistical test is poorly designed and doesn't really measure anything

It is especially telling that no matter what landmark we applied to the methodology, we have yet to get a negative result. There is, in fact, a real chance that you simply cannot get a negative result from this method.

Tabloid newspapers in the UK have a tendency to run headlines about some random thing found to either cause or cure cancer, only revealing in the text that it’s in cell cultures/lab mice or otherwise a long way from actionable lifestyle advice. There was an issue of the Daily Mail which apparently claimed the same thing to both crude and cure cancer, in two separate articles.

My feeling as well. It reads like Francis Galton haphazardly did science.