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Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
> 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.