Things that apparently cause cancer
- ID
- 31551
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 03 Oct 2026, 8:23 AM
- Fetched
- 04 Oct 2026, 6:34 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/things-that-apparently-cause-cancer
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 3.5
- Created
- 04 Oct 2026, 6:35 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learners
What happened
A critique by Deric Tilson and Adam Stein argues that Harvard-affiliated studies linking nuclear power plants to cancer use a proximity-score methodology that also yields absurd results: Costco warehouses 'cause' 120,687 annual cancer deaths, private colleges 83,782, Harvard 5,842, and MLB fields 19 times as many cancer deaths as MLS pitches. They replicated and expanded the analysis, claiming the method produces increased cancer risk/mortality no matter which landmark is used, and recap the underlying papers led by Yazan Alwadi at Harvard T.H. Chan, from a Dec 2025 Massachusetts study using a 120 km radius to national studies using 200 km radii.
Why it matters
If you build or review geospatial risk models, this is a concrete sanity-check: run the same proximity-score + regression + attributable-fraction pipeline against a neutral landmark (the article's Costco example) before trusting a claim. Otherwise, for Malaysian developers, SaaS founders, and AI/ML learners, there is no direct product, policy, or platform action here.
Discussion angle
Use the Costco and MLB examples to ask: what neutral-placebo check would you require before trusting a geospatial model's risk signal, and how would that change how you evaluate vendor or research claims?