I know you think I’m evil. And a copycat. But I assure you, I’ve wanted to take out Causation long before Relative Risk stabbed Absolute Risk in the back at last month’s Stanford talk on the lethality of packaged, ready-to-eat kale. Absolute Risk had it coming, shamelessly trying to downplay a ten-thousand-fold increased risk of choking to death if and when you eat the plastic bag.
“The overall lifetime risk of dying from a moderate consumption of kale is one in one hundred billion,” Absolute said. “So multiplying that by ten thousand means your actual chances of dying from plastic-bagged, ready-to-eat kale are extremely low, just one in ten million. The increased relative risk is statistically insignificant. Also, if you take care not to eat or swallow the bag, that risk drops to nearly zero.”
This is the same kind of reckless language that led to Causation’s death at a recent Harvard Medical School Conference, where researchers explained the link they found between office gossip and premature death by water cooler. Their study, which controlled for important factors like participants’ favorite TV shows, whether they love or hate candy corn, and their preferred sports teams, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and immediately generated lots of press. It found office employees were much more likely to sustain lethal head injuries from water-cooler bottles when talking shit about coworkers in very loud voices around said cooler.
During the presentation’s Q and A, Causation took to the microphone and, in a shrill and almost manic voice, called me “the world’s most dangerous conman.” It then accused the researchers of being shills for the bottled-water industry and the Vatican (the pope recently released a YouTube series on the evils of gossip, along with a thousand-dollar eight-module web course that teaches you how to avoid it—sign up at www.learnwithleo.com).
Causation went on to call me an intellectual lightweight and a deceiver on par with Satan for “creating a chilling effect among disgruntled employees, which attacks free speech through self-censorship,” and for inciting “fear and delusion in journalists, public health people, clinicians, and water-cooler buyers.” He ended his bitchfest by claiming, “Correlation pressed the study’s authors not to control for hanger, alcohol or drug intoxication, sleep deprivation, recent breakups, or any number of variables that compromise neurological, neuropsychological, and neuropsychiatric stability. All of these, especially being hangry, increase aggression and lower inhibition, leading to the kind of incendiary shittalk that will get a water cooler thrown at your head. Correlation doesn’t want you to know that because if you know that, you won’t click on fearmongering headlines like the Times piece “Experts Warn Office Workers to Stop Gossiping Amid Surge in Water Cooler Deaths.” Correlation gets a small cut of the paper’s subscription and advertising revenue every time you click on one of those misleading links.
As you know, I am well respected in the medical community, having exploded in popularity and influence once the internet kicked in. So I was not surprised when the audience gasped, booed, and threw pharmaceutical samples at Causation as it had its little hissy fit. When the security guard tried to escort Causation from the mic, the raving nutbag wouldn’t budge.
I’m not entirely sure what came over me in that moment, what made me snap into a homicidal rage. I was definitely hangry, and I certainly hadn’t slept well, and now that I think of it, that very morning I caught my wife, Conflict of Interest, cheating on me with Study Limitations in my very own bed, so I may have been teetering on homicidal without ever realizing it. And, you know, I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome like everyone else in academia, so Causation’s accusations hit a sore spot. They wounded my ego, and I admit my feelings were hurt.
So, in a big blind rage, I jumped off the stage, ran to the security guard, yanked his gun from the holster, and shot Causation right then and there, in front of everyone. It died on the spot.
The assassination was met with resounding applause. Some of the journalists in the audience gave me a standing ovation. A few of them even mailed flowers to my jail cell, where I was locked up until the surgeon general ordered the DA drop all charges.
“Without you, I can’t fulfill my warning quota,” the surgeon general said to me in my one phone call. “Plus, the president’s all in on your release. He’s instructed the attorney general to charge Causation with sedition posthumously, that’s legal now per an executive order signed today, for attempting to undermine our public health policies with disinformation, policies you’ve played a vital role in shaping.”
So, was it worth it? There are many variables still at play, of course, but today, two weeks after my heroic act, I learned that the president has nominated me for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, citing my unparalleled work as a medicinal vigilante. So, yeah, you tell me whether it was worth it or not.
