[mistercow]

> We used to get kids to smoke pipes to stave off chest infections because it made “intuitive sense” and it’s only because of observational studies that we now believe smoking causes lung cancer.

This is an interesting example, because I don’t know of any studies (although there probably are some, if only old ones) specifically about whether smoking pipes staves off lung infections, but the “intuitive sense” answer has changed because of adjacent evidence. And in this case, it’s not the lung cancer evidence that makes it intuitively unlikely that pipe smoking would be helpful, but a broader understanding of what causes lung infections, and what tobacco smoke contains and doesn’t contain.

[KempyKolibri]

I think that’s a fair critique! Probably would have been better to say that the intuitive position was that smoking was unrelated to lung cancer.