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beloch 4 hours ago [-]
Ironically, this article is guilty of the same thing it rails against.
No evidence is provided for the safety of THC vaping products. An NYT article that was clearly biased against THC was picked apart instead. The clear implication is that THC vapes were unjustly targeted and readers should assume the contrary of the dishonest NYT article. i.e. That THC vapes are safe. Yet, no direct evidence of that is provided. A possibly fatal lie is told purely with true facts.
Here's why that matters: THC is a recreational product. It's relatively recent legalization in only some jurisdictions is why we're just starting to get good data on it. Vaping is even newer and less well studied.
Okay, so let's say there's no clear evidence that THC vapes are harmful. I'm being a dishonest fear-monger. Or am I?
What should be the default position on recreational drugs? Specifically, ones that are inhaled? Ask a respirologist. Lungs are delicate and, if you screw yours up, you're really fubar'd. They'll tell you that, if you do want to use a relatively unstudied recreational drug, eat it or shove it up your ass. (Seriously, THC enemas are a thing.) Don't put it in your lungs.
The default position for inhaling drugs should be, "Don't" until they're proven safe. This is my opinion/bias/dishonest-agenda.
bch 3 hours ago [-]
> No evidence is provided for the safety of THC vaping products.
That's not the point - gwerns article dismantled the NYT article. If one read (or heard about) the NYT article and used it as "proof" of "vaping is bad", gwern is saying: "not so fast". That's not to say "vaping is healthy", nor even "vaping is not unhealthy" - just that this article isn't the proof you're looking for. Vaping (legal flavoured nicotine (which is what's on trial)) could be horrible - simply citing instances of why this is so isn't actually done in the article.
If it matters, I'm not condoning vaping or smoking at all.
cyanydeez 1 hours ago [-]
no. the critique has nothing to do with vaping. It picks apart nicotine vapes vs the THC specific, vitamin E specific illegally marketed/unapproved incident.
The NYT article was suppose to be about nicotine vapes and in it, they used an example that only appears related because it's a vape. The harm caused by the illegally marketed/unapproved incidence doesn't prove the new york times summary: nicotine vapes are harmful.
The fact presented about the THC vape incidences arn't categorically related to the use and marketing of nicotine vapes.
The point of the article is to showcase how examples can be technically correct (vaping superset) but not actually provide relevance (THC vapes w/vitamin E acetate caused lung damage).
aoeusnth1 3 hours ago [-]
The article explicitly and repeatedly affirms that illegal THC vapes are dangerous because of Vitamin E Acetate, which is used as a thickener agent. TFA points out how the NYT article carefully weasels its way around admitting that the THC vaping was the cause of the teenager's lung injury - the NYT is attempting to get the audience to associate the harm with legal nicotine vapes.
Does that make more sense to you now?
bityard 3 hours ago [-]
You read the gwern article very incorrectly. It was pointing out that Lizzie's injuries were caused by _adulterated_ illegal THC vapes. While the NYT article was using weasel writing techniques to mislead readers into the conclusion the that legal flavored nicotine vapes are dangerous.
card_zero 4 hours ago [-]
?
> An NYT article that was clearly biased against THC
This was an NYT article clearly biased against nicotine. One of us is confused here. Maybe I can't follow your particular idiom.
nerdsniper 4 hours ago [-]
In general for me, the default position for recreational activities should be “okay” until they’re proven dangerous to others.
Wanna jump out of an airplane with no parachute and see if one of your buddies can strap one on you before you hit the ground? Totally fine with me.
Wanna base-jump off a skyscraper in NYC with a wing-suit ? Fuck off. You’ll probably hurt someone else who didn’t sign up for that.
That said, I’d also like the CPSC to look into whether products like this are safe and hold manufacturers accountable for their consequences.
I’d also very much appreciate it if the FTC and FDA actually did thorough random testing of drugs and supplements (recreational or therapeutic) to ensure that the actual ingredients and doses match the label. The FDA requires drug manufacturers to be in compliance, but doesn’t actually test drugs themselves, they mostly just look over paperwork to see if the processes followed would probably produce the correct product and assume the paperwork isn’t manipulated.
In fact, the FDA actively works to prevent people, even the Pentagon, from doing independent 3rd party drug testing of common pharmaceuticals [0]
Respectfully, I don't agree at all. I didn't read the OP article and think they were defending the safety of any kind of vaping. What they credibly point out is the deliberate conflation of nicotine and THC vaping. The NYT article repeatedly suggests that the hospitalization of people vaping was from "nicotine and THC" when the specific lung damage reported was from illicit THC products specifically.
ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago [-]
> The default position for inhaling drugs should be, "Don't" until they're proven safe. This is my opinion/bias/dishonest-agenda.
Ideally don't inhale anything that's not fairly clean air.
cyanydeez 56 minutes ago [-]
you missed the critique entirely. The critique isn't "THC vaping is safe to the contrary" or "Nicotine vaping is fine".
The critique is: "This article uses a rhetorical device (THC vapes with vitamin E acetate are harmful) to suggest that nicotine vapes are harmful, when there's nothing in common other than being a vape product"
It's goal isn't to refute the evidence, but to suggest the editors and writers of the articles did not provide a sufficient connection between the THC-vape incidents and the harm caused by nicotine vapes, yet spent the entire article convolution any distinctions between the two, to implicate nicotine vaping as equally harmful as the THC infused vitamin-e lung damage incidents.
Had the writers & editors at the NYT had any nicotine vape related direct harm, that would have connected the THC-vape incidences. But just writing this sentence, you can see how continually repeating THC-vape incidences biases you to understanding that there's a difference.
And that's the point, NYT article went out of it's way to convolute direct harm incidences to a broader vaping category when there's no evidence to suggest nicotine vaping is susceptable to the same direct harm. It's like saying bob drove his car drunk & crashed, therefore, driving cars is dangerous. We know it's dangerous but the "driving drunk" doesn't prove they're dangerous. You can do lots of dangerous things while drunk.
Similarly, THC-infused vitamin E acetate in vapes caused lung damage. Is the operable cause the Vape or the THC-infused vitamin E acetate; no evidence is presented that it's anything other than the vape liquid by all other sources. That is to say, no evidence by NYT is presented that some other substance in a vape is equally harmful.
If you want to get into the science, go ahead, a vape is vaporizing things. So it matters what those things it's vaporizing is. And if it's incomplete vaporization, then it's possible harmful chemicals are being generated. So perhaps the article needed to present the basic facts about vapes.
CamelCaseCondo 43 minutes ago [-]
So one thing that always strikes me about vaping is that we ignore the metal heater. It’ a coil of metal that glows, during which it will boil off metal atoms. After a while it has lost so much material that is breaks and needs to be replaced. That metal went into your lungs.
cwillu 6 hours ago [-]
The problem with gwern posts is that there are so rarely anything to nitpick, to spark conversation in the comments.
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
There is plenty of stuff to nitpick but it's the kind of thing that internet commenters who read his articles dismiss as poorly reasoned because it involves indirect social impact and presentation rather than content.
olalonde 3 hours ago [-]
Apparently, a lot of people blame his nicotine article for getting addicted to nicotine.
card_zero 4 hours ago [-]
I'm unclear on the NYT motivation. "Let's pin it on the nicotine vapes," why? Scare stories sell papers, I guess.
Calvin02 5 hours ago [-]
This doesn't surprise me.
I grew up reading NYTimes on the weekend with my parents. I held them in extreme high regard when it came to their news and journalistic integrity. Over the years, I've shifted to think of them as another data point. For the industries that I'm most familiar with (Tech, Finance, and Pharma), I find their reporting often shallow, lacking in nuance, or intentional/unintentional misreporting. And I often wonder if their reporting of other areas is similarly lacking.
Now, they are just another data point, which is sad.
sho 2 hours ago [-]
Same story with me. To be clear, I am a subscriber, though I tend to hold out for the ultra-cheap last ditch retention deals they through at you. But I take them with a grain of salt these days. They have a narrative like anywhere else, and they don't let the full facts get in its way.
Michael Crichton said it best:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
pram 2 hours ago [-]
The NYT (and Judith Miller) was one of the most shameless shills of the Iraq War, laundering complete bullshit and lies. It’s not completely bad, there have been outstanding individuals, and the election coverage is still the best imo, but there is no reason to believe the organization has higher integrity than the rest of the MSM.
Pay08 4 hours ago [-]
Honestly, they have never been particularly trustworthy. People go on about the "newspaper of record" title, but as far as I can see, those are mainly handed out on the basis of age, not actual quality and journalistic integrity.
teravor 5 hours ago [-]
nearly all the value in a news article comes from the collation of facts needed to formulate it.
i would much rather read this collation directly, give me bullet points. in such a structured format it would also be easier to analyze if a given statement is too specific or has too many qualifiers. it would also be easier to notice what's missing.
arjie 5 hours ago [-]
A very well-done read through of the article. Another top-notch work from Gwern[0]. I've found that this kind of sophistry is quite common in some circles. For instance, for things for which you want funding to be cut "only x% of the money went to y" while for things for which you want funding to not be cut "the things the money goes to include a, b, and c". The "include a, b, and c" is true but perhaps not informative. There are quite a few of these ways to make weasel arguments where each sentence is true, and the reasoning is nonetheless fallacious or motivated.
I've been trying to find a place where people write down these tricks so that I can at least name and classify them for myself. There's one that particularly gets me, a kind of false aggregation. Say breast cancer is 99% treatable and costs $1m and prostate cancer is 1% treatable and the most you'd spend is $1k. Suppose someone said "cancers can be as bad as 1% treatable while attempts can be up to $1m to do". Well, that makes it sound like there's a cancer where you spend a mil and it's 1%. This kind of false aggregation obscures the truth.
It would be useful to me so I can concisely name this kind of thing and then work with it to preserve epistemic hygiene.
0: The distinctively beautiful website is brand enough haha
kleton 4 hours ago [-]
Truly a case where the old word polytropōs applies.
scarmig 5 hours ago [-]
One of the more amusing things about the vape panic is that it's now easier to purchase fentanyl adulterated meth in San Francisco than it is to get a Juul pod. And it's riskier to be a seller of the latter than the former.
Public health officials are throwing their credibility into a bonfire when they land on a fixation and use heavy handed strategies to pursue their goals, without a sense of proportionality or efficacy.
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
I genuinely have no idea how to purchase fentanyl adulterated meth in San Francisco despite residing there. I assume there is probably some guy who knows a guy who might hook me up but it would be pretty sketchy.
On the flip side I can literally type "vape shop" into Google and get a handful of options in walking distance that I could stroll into legally and purchase whatever I wanted, as long as it was not flavored. That too is something Google is happy to share with me.
4 hours ago [-]
slopinthebag 6 hours ago [-]
I vaped for a couple months but stopped when I started to have my heart race when I would stand up suddenly. Ears started to crackle as well. Not saying the article is wrong, but I think there are probably good reasons to chose alternatives...
loeg 4 hours ago [-]
> Not saying the article is wrong, but I think there are probably good reasons to chose alternatives...
This concern is addressed in the article.
> it would be possible to write this story without bringing in irrelevant THC-contaminated anecdotes or EVALI, by focusing on legitimate criticisms of nicotine vaping. (You could discuss teen access, flavor marketing, age checks, FDA jurisdiction, statutory drafting, the economics of disposable devices, and the adult harm-reduction case without ever mentioning EVALI which you know is not related to teen access to legal anything.)
slopinthebag 3 hours ago [-]
I don't see how any of that is relevant to what I said.
If you need nic, snus is by far the best for you.
loeg 2 hours ago [-]
You're discussing legitimate criticisms of nicotine vaping; the article isn't opposed to that, it just explicitly isn't a focus.
paleotrope 6 hours ago [-]
Glad they wrote this, but then some people have been reading the "news" like this for decades.
like_any_other 7 hours ago [-]
I sure am glad such deception is limited to that one vaping article.
YZF 7 hours ago [-]
Some people might not realize there's a /s in there.
zrezzed 6 hours ago [-]
I’m disappointed this is the first comment on this post.
gwern’s writing (including on nicotine) was formative for me; it showed me how and why the internet the was important: it let me read good, well written thinking I had never seen from the NYTs or my parents.
I first saw a link to gwern.net on HN. And I trusted the NYTs as an institution then, and do to this day… and I’m sure I clicked through, and took the gwern post seriously in part because comments weren’t universally negative.
You can point to bounded trust problems, or talk more about how “The Media Very Rarely Lies”…
But please don’t take up the first comment on a gwern post to cheap shot the NYTs
lacewing 5 hours ago [-]
Meh. Writing like this was formative for me (before Gwern; I'm old), but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else. It just manifests in a different way?
It boils down to an obvious disparity in the standard of proof they demand for "pet" topics versus what they need for everything else. You can do this kind of ultra-nitpicky "rational inquiry" to undermine anything you don't like. You can use it to argue against seatbelts. Or against the ban on lead paint. Was lead paint really all that bad?... and I mean, really? Are there studies? Are they high quality enough?... Double-blind? Confounding factors? Correlation or causation? Even if they look solid, I bet they contain enough errors to cast doubt. Cui bono? What was the role of the titanium dioxide lobby in all this?
For nicotine specifically, I've been around enough people seriously addicted to nicotine to just roll my eyes at this stuff. I had things thrown at me by a visibly jittery relative when I refused to smuggle cigarettes into a hospital. Do I have a published double-blind study showing that it's worse than coffee? No. But again, neither do rationalists for 99% of the stuff they believe in.
Do I think that vapes are a noteworthy problem to be focusing on? Maybe not, but public policy is always to some extent vibe-based. And the harm of being too heavy-handed on vapes is really not something that keeps me up at night.
card_zero 4 hours ago [-]
They insinuated that the ordinary vapes caused serious lung injury. The blame lay elsewhere, but you think it's fine to shift it around to your preferred target.
lacewing 3 hours ago [-]
No. I was answering to parent's broader comment about "formative" writings on nicotine. And I was making my own broader point that the NYT piece is biased, but selective evidence-seeking in the rationalist community doesn't deserve any special praise.
moravak1984 4 hours ago [-]
> Meh. Writing like this was formative for me (before Gwern; I'm old), but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else. It just manifests in a different way?
Could you point out to some examples? Is there any "rational inquiry" that shows a worldview bias from the rationalists, in your opinion?
I agree that the broader smarty-pants community may have this issue, just curious to read your examples.
I think this nicely pointed out in "The Big Bang Theory", where Sheldon Cooper says something like "If I would be wrong, don't you think I would know about it?" That sounds like something Elmo M would say with a serious face.
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
Rationalists are not necessarily better at thinking than you are, they're just usually better cited. That isn't to say there isn't value in being able to cite your beliefs, but if you try very hard you can find data that justifies just about anything, omit nontrivial externalities, and expect any arbitrarily high standard of evidence because that is what you need to think well and good, when in fact they just spend more time being comfortable with conversations that involve p-values and metacognition than you are and will seek to draw you onto their home turf for that discussion.
In this case, for example, I doubt that Gwern is seeking to mislead, but I have heard (hearsay, I know) that there are people who read this, start vaping, and legitimately end up with nicotine additions from much worse stuff. Sure, there's nothing false said here, but you can definitely say only true things about vapes and neglect to mention that your readers of this have ended up more likely to die of lung cancer than they might have had you not published this. I think someone who was truly rationalist would find that in itself an interesting topic of conversation but it seems to rarely come up that being super pedantic often leads to negative outcomes because presumably this would make them shine a mirror at themselves in a way that they are almost intentionally incapable of discussing.
qsera 3 hours ago [-]
>but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else.
In other words, uninitialized intellectuals are just plebs with a degree or browse HN or worse reddit. They become nice "mouth pieces" for the businesses to mobilize the masses in the name of "science" or "social justice".
queenkjuul 4 hours ago [-]
I abandoned NYT when they ran cover for Iraq. How that wasn't a death sentence for US papers says a lot imo
vkou 3 hours ago [-]
Why would it be? People love patriotically murdering a bunch of other people in a place that never lifted a finger against them.
It shows us that we are strong, and others are weak, and that we need to attack the weak before they become strong and destroy us.
This sort of shit sells like hotcakes.
internet_points 2 hours ago [-]
Also those pictures of the tyrant's statue being torn down, very newsfriendly. Maybe we can have another round of those soon without even travelling outside the US.
5 hours ago [-]
jmull 4 hours ago [-]
Let's not forget: the vaping business model is to turn kids into addicts and then keep selling them the drug.
I'm not exactly going to get outraged at the NYT's rhetorical tactics against vaping.
bityard 3 hours ago [-]
Do you believe the NYT's activist biases will always line up perfectly with yours?
yrjrjjrjjtjjr 3 hours ago [-]
If I tell a lie to support a good cause and you tell a lie to support the same cause and a third and a fourth person do the same thing then, then, being so propped up by lies how can we be sure it even is a good cause worth lying for?
In this way, the harms of lying compound while the benefits do not. For this reason I believe it highly unwise to allow it to be normalized.
No evidence is provided for the safety of THC vaping products. An NYT article that was clearly biased against THC was picked apart instead. The clear implication is that THC vapes were unjustly targeted and readers should assume the contrary of the dishonest NYT article. i.e. That THC vapes are safe. Yet, no direct evidence of that is provided. A possibly fatal lie is told purely with true facts.
Here's why that matters: THC is a recreational product. It's relatively recent legalization in only some jurisdictions is why we're just starting to get good data on it. Vaping is even newer and less well studied.
Okay, so let's say there's no clear evidence that THC vapes are harmful. I'm being a dishonest fear-monger. Or am I?
What should be the default position on recreational drugs? Specifically, ones that are inhaled? Ask a respirologist. Lungs are delicate and, if you screw yours up, you're really fubar'd. They'll tell you that, if you do want to use a relatively unstudied recreational drug, eat it or shove it up your ass. (Seriously, THC enemas are a thing.) Don't put it in your lungs.
The default position for inhaling drugs should be, "Don't" until they're proven safe. This is my opinion/bias/dishonest-agenda.
That's not the point - gwerns article dismantled the NYT article. If one read (or heard about) the NYT article and used it as "proof" of "vaping is bad", gwern is saying: "not so fast". That's not to say "vaping is healthy", nor even "vaping is not unhealthy" - just that this article isn't the proof you're looking for. Vaping (legal flavoured nicotine (which is what's on trial)) could be horrible - simply citing instances of why this is so isn't actually done in the article.
If it matters, I'm not condoning vaping or smoking at all.
The NYT article was suppose to be about nicotine vapes and in it, they used an example that only appears related because it's a vape. The harm caused by the illegally marketed/unapproved incidence doesn't prove the new york times summary: nicotine vapes are harmful.
The fact presented about the THC vape incidences arn't categorically related to the use and marketing of nicotine vapes.
The point of the article is to showcase how examples can be technically correct (vaping superset) but not actually provide relevance (THC vapes w/vitamin E acetate caused lung damage).
Does that make more sense to you now?
> An NYT article that was clearly biased against THC
This was an NYT article clearly biased against nicotine. One of us is confused here. Maybe I can't follow your particular idiom.
Wanna jump out of an airplane with no parachute and see if one of your buddies can strap one on you before you hit the ground? Totally fine with me.
Wanna base-jump off a skyscraper in NYC with a wing-suit ? Fuck off. You’ll probably hurt someone else who didn’t sign up for that.
That said, I’d also like the CPSC to look into whether products like this are safe and hold manufacturers accountable for their consequences.
I’d also very much appreciate it if the FTC and FDA actually did thorough random testing of drugs and supplements (recreational or therapeutic) to ensure that the actual ingredients and doses match the label. The FDA requires drug manufacturers to be in compliance, but doesn’t actually test drugs themselves, they mostly just look over paperwork to see if the processes followed would probably produce the correct product and assume the paperwork isn’t manipulated.
In fact, the FDA actively works to prevent people, even the Pentagon, from doing independent 3rd party drug testing of common pharmaceuticals [0]
0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-12-05/pentagon-... / https://archive.is/eyWSn
Ideally don't inhale anything that's not fairly clean air.
The critique is: "This article uses a rhetorical device (THC vapes with vitamin E acetate are harmful) to suggest that nicotine vapes are harmful, when there's nothing in common other than being a vape product"
It's goal isn't to refute the evidence, but to suggest the editors and writers of the articles did not provide a sufficient connection between the THC-vape incidents and the harm caused by nicotine vapes, yet spent the entire article convolution any distinctions between the two, to implicate nicotine vaping as equally harmful as the THC infused vitamin-e lung damage incidents.
Had the writers & editors at the NYT had any nicotine vape related direct harm, that would have connected the THC-vape incidences. But just writing this sentence, you can see how continually repeating THC-vape incidences biases you to understanding that there's a difference.
And that's the point, NYT article went out of it's way to convolute direct harm incidences to a broader vaping category when there's no evidence to suggest nicotine vaping is susceptable to the same direct harm. It's like saying bob drove his car drunk & crashed, therefore, driving cars is dangerous. We know it's dangerous but the "driving drunk" doesn't prove they're dangerous. You can do lots of dangerous things while drunk.
Similarly, THC-infused vitamin E acetate in vapes caused lung damage. Is the operable cause the Vape or the THC-infused vitamin E acetate; no evidence is presented that it's anything other than the vape liquid by all other sources. That is to say, no evidence by NYT is presented that some other substance in a vape is equally harmful.
If you want to get into the science, go ahead, a vape is vaporizing things. So it matters what those things it's vaporizing is. And if it's incomplete vaporization, then it's possible harmful chemicals are being generated. So perhaps the article needed to present the basic facts about vapes.
I grew up reading NYTimes on the weekend with my parents. I held them in extreme high regard when it came to their news and journalistic integrity. Over the years, I've shifted to think of them as another data point. For the industries that I'm most familiar with (Tech, Finance, and Pharma), I find their reporting often shallow, lacking in nuance, or intentional/unintentional misreporting. And I often wonder if their reporting of other areas is similarly lacking.
Now, they are just another data point, which is sad.
Michael Crichton said it best:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
i would much rather read this collation directly, give me bullet points. in such a structured format it would also be easier to analyze if a given statement is too specific or has too many qualifiers. it would also be easier to notice what's missing.
I've been trying to find a place where people write down these tricks so that I can at least name and classify them for myself. There's one that particularly gets me, a kind of false aggregation. Say breast cancer is 99% treatable and costs $1m and prostate cancer is 1% treatable and the most you'd spend is $1k. Suppose someone said "cancers can be as bad as 1% treatable while attempts can be up to $1m to do". Well, that makes it sound like there's a cancer where you spend a mil and it's 1%. This kind of false aggregation obscures the truth.
It would be useful to me so I can concisely name this kind of thing and then work with it to preserve epistemic hygiene.
0: The distinctively beautiful website is brand enough haha
Public health officials are throwing their credibility into a bonfire when they land on a fixation and use heavy handed strategies to pursue their goals, without a sense of proportionality or efficacy.
On the flip side I can literally type "vape shop" into Google and get a handful of options in walking distance that I could stroll into legally and purchase whatever I wanted, as long as it was not flavored. That too is something Google is happy to share with me.
This concern is addressed in the article.
> it would be possible to write this story without bringing in irrelevant THC-contaminated anecdotes or EVALI, by focusing on legitimate criticisms of nicotine vaping. (You could discuss teen access, flavor marketing, age checks, FDA jurisdiction, statutory drafting, the economics of disposable devices, and the adult harm-reduction case without ever mentioning EVALI which you know is not related to teen access to legal anything.)
If you need nic, snus is by far the best for you.
gwern’s writing (including on nicotine) was formative for me; it showed me how and why the internet the was important: it let me read good, well written thinking I had never seen from the NYTs or my parents.
I first saw a link to gwern.net on HN. And I trusted the NYTs as an institution then, and do to this day… and I’m sure I clicked through, and took the gwern post seriously in part because comments weren’t universally negative.
You can point to bounded trust problems, or talk more about how “The Media Very Rarely Lies”…
But please don’t take up the first comment on a gwern post to cheap shot the NYTs
It boils down to an obvious disparity in the standard of proof they demand for "pet" topics versus what they need for everything else. You can do this kind of ultra-nitpicky "rational inquiry" to undermine anything you don't like. You can use it to argue against seatbelts. Or against the ban on lead paint. Was lead paint really all that bad?... and I mean, really? Are there studies? Are they high quality enough?... Double-blind? Confounding factors? Correlation or causation? Even if they look solid, I bet they contain enough errors to cast doubt. Cui bono? What was the role of the titanium dioxide lobby in all this?
For nicotine specifically, I've been around enough people seriously addicted to nicotine to just roll my eyes at this stuff. I had things thrown at me by a visibly jittery relative when I refused to smuggle cigarettes into a hospital. Do I have a published double-blind study showing that it's worse than coffee? No. But again, neither do rationalists for 99% of the stuff they believe in.
Do I think that vapes are a noteworthy problem to be focusing on? Maybe not, but public policy is always to some extent vibe-based. And the harm of being too heavy-handed on vapes is really not something that keeps me up at night.
Could you point out to some examples? Is there any "rational inquiry" that shows a worldview bias from the rationalists, in your opinion?
I agree that the broader smarty-pants community may have this issue, just curious to read your examples.
I think this nicely pointed out in "The Big Bang Theory", where Sheldon Cooper says something like "If I would be wrong, don't you think I would know about it?" That sounds like something Elmo M would say with a serious face.
In this case, for example, I doubt that Gwern is seeking to mislead, but I have heard (hearsay, I know) that there are people who read this, start vaping, and legitimately end up with nicotine additions from much worse stuff. Sure, there's nothing false said here, but you can definitely say only true things about vapes and neglect to mention that your readers of this have ended up more likely to die of lung cancer than they might have had you not published this. I think someone who was truly rationalist would find that in itself an interesting topic of conversation but it seems to rarely come up that being super pedantic often leads to negative outcomes because presumably this would make them shine a mirror at themselves in a way that they are almost intentionally incapable of discussing.
In other words, uninitialized intellectuals are just plebs with a degree or browse HN or worse reddit. They become nice "mouth pieces" for the businesses to mobilize the masses in the name of "science" or "social justice".
It shows us that we are strong, and others are weak, and that we need to attack the weak before they become strong and destroy us.
This sort of shit sells like hotcakes.
I'm not exactly going to get outraged at the NYT's rhetorical tactics against vaping.
In this way, the harms of lying compound while the benefits do not. For this reason I believe it highly unwise to allow it to be normalized.