NYT and Vaping: How to Lie by Saying Only True Things (2022)

The problem with gwern posts is that there are so rarely anything to nitpick, to spark conversation in the comments.

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.

Glad they wrote this, but then some people have been reading the "news" like this for decades.

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

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.

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.

I abandoned NYT when they ran cover for Iraq. How that wasn't a death sentence for US papers says a lot imo

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...

I sure am glad such deception is limited to that one vaping article.