Cancer, bad luck, and a pair of paradoxes

Among the highlights of my recent visit to IMO were several stimulating discussions with Artem Kaznatcheev. I’m still thinking over my response to his recent post about reductionist versus operationalist approaches in math biology, which is very relevant to some of my current research. Meanwhile, at Artem’s suggestion, this post will discuss a reanalysis of the “cancer and bad luck” paper that spurred so many headlines at the start of this year. Whereas many others have written critiques of that paper’s statistical methods and interpretations, my colleagues and I instead tried fitting alternative models to the underlying data. We thus found ourselves revisiting a couple of celebrated scientific paradoxes.

To start this post, I will introduce you to Simpson’s paradox and Peto’s paradox. With these pair of paradoxes in mind, we’ll turn a critical eye to Tomasetti & Vogelstein (2015), and I will explain our reanalysis of their data set.