1660: George Davey Smith
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/03/06
“The consensus that HDL-C was protective, popularly reified in the notion of ‘good cholesterol’, strengthened over subsequent years.”
“It is sobering to realize that many issues that appear suitable targets for epidemiological investigation are simply refractory to conventional approaches.”
“The instability of these estimates was, to us, both striking and disturbing.”
“Our paper had no influence whatsoever, probably deservedly so.”
“The armed wing of health-promotion agencies had started shooting smokers as the ultimate deterrent.”
“Only two approaches proved useful in studying this issue: RCTs and Mendelian randomization (MR).”
“It is considerably easier to explain with the diagram.”
“So these things are unequivocal gains for epidemiology.”
“DAGs aren’t required to make that sort of statement.”
“I’ve seen very few examples of that which have followed on from DAG modelling.”
“‘No measurement error’ plus ‘No unmeasured confounding’ equals ‘Not epidemiological data’.”
“It’s very useful to have DAGS for transportability of the structure of biases.”
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