[dionidium]

If you want to feel some dissonance about this, you might note that this is the exact language the CDC uses for things like secondhand smoke -- "There is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke" -- which everybody nods along to and accepts without much scrutiny.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...

Meanwhile, when it's something like, say, cosmic radiation exposure from commercial air travel, suddenly the CDC is very interested in levels of exposure and has language that provides context intended to downplay the risks.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/air_travel.html

Why these statements bother us when they're about one thing and not another -- or, indeed, why our health agencies would choose language like this for some kinds of risks and not others -- is left as an exercise for the reader.

[dahart]

There is no dissonance here, this is FUD. The language is wildly different because the actual risks are wildly different. One kills a lot of people and the other doesn’t.

How many people are actually dying from air travel radiation? The numbers are low enough that they’re hard to find evidence for. Here’s a study, for example, that attempted to answer the question for pilots, who obviously fly frequently. They weren’t even able to detect higher death rates at all. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14648170/ “Neither external and internal comparisons nor nested case-control analyses showed any substantially increased risks for cancer mortality due to ionizing radiation.” (Edit: of course there are some studies that demonstrate small amounts of increased cancer risk, and increased risk of pregnancy complications for airline crews. The numbers are small.)

On the other hand, “Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States” https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

Even if you are skeptical of the CDC’s estimates for mortality rates by things like second hand smoke, there are pretty clear reasons to take smoking a lot more seriously as a risk than radiation exposure from air travel, the direct risk to smokers is orders of magnitude higher than the risk of air travel radiation.

The fact that the CDC’s language reflects the actual risks is a good reason to put more trust in what they say, not less. They’re not trying to hide something from you, they’re trying to help you understand the actual relative differences in risk, which are much, much higher for smoking.

Edit2: BTW, the WHO agrees with the CDC about there being no safe levels of smoke, and is backed by significant amounts of research and outcome statistics worldwide. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(ou...

[dionidium]

First of all, this is a good and fair pushback.

But I’d respond that I chose secondhand smoke for a reason. I similarly doubt there’s any measurable impact of being around a smoker every once in a while, but the language around secondhand smoke got more and more hysterical leading up to the widespread implementation of smoking bans, to the point that it’s not uncommon today to hear people complain that walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside is a risk to their health.

That’s basically absurd.

But the “no safe level of exposure” language has been used to justify such claims.

Finally, to be clear, even if you think this language is good and useful, there’s still utility in thinking about why that’s true, especially if hearing similar language about alcohol bothers you for some reason.

[dahart]

With over a billion smokers on the planet, or ~20% of the population, it’s not that absurd to worry about urban smoke outdoors contributing to urban pollution. Nor wood burning house & backyard fires either, nor cars, but that’s a different debate… We aren’t around smokers once in a while, we’re around them constantly. Even urban outdoor second hand smoke really is a higher risk than air travel radiation.

Yes I want the language to be specific about the levels of risk. I would agree that “no safe levels” is vague and less helpful than one or two percentile data points. That said, I completely agree with the CDC’s stance and language on both second hand smoke and air travel radiation.

[robocat]

I wish it were acceptable to complain about stinky purfumes and body sprays. They fill the air with volatile organic compounds. Plenty of people are happy to chuck on something smelly while hypocritically complaining about other types of smells. Some cause allergies (hayfever) in me to the point I have to leave an enclosed space or suffer consequences. I know friends that get headaches from them.

[mc32]

Hear, hear! Some are worse than others, some don't bother much, but lots of perfumes give me headaches.

[Brian_K_White]

Right. And where is the "no safe level of exposure to perfume" PSA?

It's entirely rational to suspect the motives and veracity of statements like this.

[nefitty]

The harder you make it to engage a behavior, the more likely it is to become extinguished or reduce. These are nusges. It's basically how you influence people incrementally toward a desired outcome.

I too, am bothered by some of the history of tobacco-related data. I am ok with the government using indirect methods to reduce tobacco deaths.

Wearing perfume doesn't makebthe too of preventable deaths. Perfume smell may be as annoying as cigarette smoke to some people. There's a clear reason why there's societal pressure to address and regulate one I dustry as opposed to another.

Whether a given government is using shit science and where it draws its concerns in regards to societal pressure valves to release, has a lot to do with who the leaders of the administration are. This is why politics needs to be a leading concern for any researcher or citizen that prefers effective methods of dispersing evidence-based knowledge.

[GoblinSlayer]

I once encountered a smoker who smoked something seriously insane that smelled like burning shit. I could barely believe it's happening.

[tagoregrtst]

“ it’s not that absurd to worry about urban smoke outdoors contributing to urban pollution”

Where do you live that second hand smoke is a significant urban level pollutant?

Take a pack of cigarettes, 25g, divide it by 3 (your 30% of people are smokers) = 8.3 g per capita and burn it.

Now consider all the diesel per capita that is burned in this dystopian city of smokers.

No, we don't get to pretend these trucks have diesel particulate filters. Not if the city has 30% smokers. [1]

Anyway, at 8g/person, pollution controls wont save the argument - smoking is a negligible urban level pollutant.

[1] or propose a city with lots of smokers that has strict and enforced diesel rules. Tel Aviv? Israelis used to love to smoke.

[enzino]

Reminds me of a discussion at a students' senate meeting on campus a few years back, when they were discussing banning tobacco smoke everywhere including in the parks away from buildings. People who noted that PM2.5/PM10 emissions from construction sites (ubiquitous at the time), or even BBQs, where much greater than cigarettes, even if all people on campus were chain smoking (we maybe had 5% smokers), were ostracized. The times we live in lol.

[dahart]

There are other large source of particulate emissions, larger than cigarettes, there is no doubt about that. Why would that mean we shouldn’t have rules about smoking in public places? Is it okay to try to address multiple issues at the same time, and do something about the ones we actually have control over, even if it only partially addresses the problem?

It’d probably be ideal to eliminate the other sources of particulates too, it’s not necessarily a competition, though we all like buildings and BBQ. But out of curiosity - were the people noting that one BBQ is a bigger source of particulates than one cigarette also being fair about the averages, like the fact that there are generally many fewer BBQs running at far lower density and far less often than cigarettes? Are you sure they weren’t argued down because the point might be both somewhat misleading and also somewhat irrelevant? (I’m not certain about that, just suggesting it’s possible. It’s also a fact that there are people who like to ride on high horses and get uppity about their beliefs. I might be one of them sometimes.)

[enzino]

Exactly, you mention beliefs, while the point was (is?) one of science. By the way, have you ever heard of banning coal BBQs? I'm not sure at all that the exposure is less severe. Say you are at a party, there's a BBQ 20ft away, and some annoying guy lights a cig 10ft away. I'd bet you money that the BBQ harms you more, or at least emits more than 4 times (you need to scale by the square, diffusion of a fluid) PM2.5 than the cigarette.

[lmm]

> Even urban outdoor second hand smoke really is a higher risk than air travel radiation.

Isn't this exactly what's in dispute? What's the evidence that this is true?

[dahart]

Not really. The actual topic of conversation underneath the smoke is the political neutrality of the CDC, and public mistrust of science and government funded sources of information.

If you are really curious about the evidence, follow the thread up and click the links. I already posted links that have some stats and links to studies on the harms of second-hand smoke, and so did @dionidium too. :)

[lmm]

I didn't see anything in your links that addressed second-hand smoke specifically? I think there's a broad consensus that a) tobacco is a significant cause of premature death b) low outdoor air quality (e.g. high PM25) is a significant cause of premature death. But given that tobacco smoke does not show up in your link's list of major contributors to low outdoor air quality, that does not add up to a statement that second-hand smoke is significantly dangerous.

[dionidium]

To be clear, I don't think the CDC is full of political operatives intent on fighting a culture war. What I think is that almost nobody at the CDC smokes, that they don't know many smokers, that they (correctly, more or less) perceive smoking to be a lower-class-coded activity, that there is probably near-universal agreement within the CDC that smoking is an undesirable (maybe even "gross") activity (associated with low levels of educational attainment).

On the other hand, they all fly in airplanes. They attach little or no moral weight to flying. Everybody they know flies on airplanes. Etc, etc.

I think it's unlikely that this isn't influencing their language. The risk of smoking, in their view, isn't something to be managed or weighed or compared; rather, smoking is an abhorrent activity that should be stamped out of existence.

How could that possibly not influence how they write about it?

[cleansingfire]

Note the change from secondhand smoke to outdoor secondhand smoke, once you responded rationally. This poster may be a bot.

[throwawaylinux]

It's not absurd to worry about it, it is absurd to say there is no safe exposure level and leave it at that. Especially because so many people smoke it is important to be informed about the actual risks of second hand smoke.

If I'm walking down the street do I need to cross the street if I see someone approach with a cigarette? If I'm at a bar and smell smoke coming in should I leave?

[dahart]

I hear your point, and agreed already that more detail would be nice.

To be fair, the CDC does not ‘leave it at that’. Their page that @dionidium linked to does not either start with or stop with the statement “there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke.” It’s one statement among many that include actual statistics, and so incredulity over a line of summary taken out of context might be slightly misplaced.

The CDC is in the business of setting guidelines, so the context of their statement that it’s not risk free is a suggestion that regardless of your situation, it would be better to not expose yourself to smoke. This happens to be in complete agreement with the message and recently updated guidelines by the World Health Organization, and with statements by the American Medical Association.

Reasonable people are free to make reasonable choices. A little smoking and drinking isn’t going to kill anyone, and we all know that. So we don’t need to get upset when someone says a little is a little bit bad. That said, for someone with athsma, they might reasonably choose to cross the street, since smoke is a trigger and meeting someone on the street who smokes is a very common occurrence if you walk around in urban areas. If they go to a bar, then they’re probably asking for it. :P

[Brian_K_White]

No safe level means one person a mile away is a problem.

I bet they would say that's absurd, with a straight face.

[enzino]

A wise man I knew used to say

"Dilution is the solution to pollution".

In fact, once you think about it, that's also the only solution.

[shard]

To bring it to the relevant topic of the day, I don't believe I will ever see the CDC issue a statement that "no level of exposure to the COVID-19 virus is safe", and recommend China level of quarantine.

[quantgenius]

Walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside IS a risk to my health and the health of my children. I have asthma as do my children. Both my children and I have had asthma attacks due to second hand smoke, even limited quantities. As a smoker you may not notice this but the smell from even a whiff of second hand smoke persists for a long time and it's awful. Our family gives smokers on the sidewalk a very wide berth.

Nobody gets to create a hazard to others walking on a sidewalk. If a business wanted to dispose of an equivalently toxic substance out in the open, they would be heavily fined and shut down. Why should smokers have a special right to do this and, incidentally, litter cigarette butts all over the place?

I'm extremely grateful to live in NYC where there is a (frequently violated but still) ban on smoking inside all public parks. I would absolutely support a sidewalk smoking ban and better enforcement of the ban on smoking in parks and within 25 feet of building entrances in NYC and limit smoking to private property with the smoker responsible for ensuring second hand smoke does not affect adjoining private property.

The primary difference between smoking and alcohol is that with alcohol, there is no equivalent to second hand smoke. When someone who drinks alcohol creates a negative externality for those around, they are ticketed or arrested depending on what they did, everything from drunk driving laws to drunken disorderly laws. I'd love to see a laws on the books similar to drunk driving laws that addressed the issue of smoking around minors.

Now if the CDC said there was no safe level of exposure to nicotine and so we should ban all nicotine gum, that would be absurd.

[shard]

Along the lines of second hand smoke, are there any levels of safe exposure to air pollution (considering recent studies saying that chronic exposure is equivalent to losing one year of education)? In that case, internal combustion engine exhaust might be a larger source of health risk than outdoor second hand smoke, depending on where you live.

[dahart]

The research and statistics are trending toward the conclusion that there are no safe levels of exposure to pollution, car/ICE or otherwise. The 2021 WHO report is pretty good/interesting stuff https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/345329/9789...

Personally, I’m pretty certain that cars are a bigger contributor to overall air pollution than cigarettes. I would guess much bigger, however Googling this question will return studies that claim to show cigarette pollution is worse per gram of smoke or whatever.

I don’t know what it means to lose a year of education, that sounds like it could be a little hyperbolic, and hyperbolic stuff does get said unfortunately.

Anyway, we can and should work on both problems, cars and cigarettes, we don’t need to limit ourselves to which one is worse, they’re both bad. Smoking alone really does contribute significantly to early mortality globally, so it really is a problem to solve.

Cigarettes are also, unlike cars, a completely optional choice. Unlike the reasons to drive, the reasons to smoke are not backed by any economic needs or economic benefits aside from income to the tobacco companies. There is no socially redeeming value to smoking, where there is a lot for cars (jobs, food distribution, transportation & travel, etc). So, it will be far easier to stop people from smoking, and reduce overall death, than it will be to stop people from driving.

[dionidium]

Well at least now nobody can claim I made up this objection.

[derefr]

> to hear people complain that walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside is a risk to their health

Doesn't have to be the smoke itself that's harmful. Presumably, if you can smell someone's second-hand smoke, you're also inhaling the bacterial spray contained in their breath, no? Something I think about if I'm walking outside without a mask on and end up stuck walking for a while behind a smoker. I tend to put my mask back on.

[GekkePrutser]

That's what our immune system is for.

Covid is a problem at the moment but bacteria really aren't. Your chance to die from a bacterial infection randomly caught from someone in the street is minimal, and exposure boosts your immunity. And they are everywhere anyway.

You might get a cold for a few days but that's life.

[CompelTechnic]

The bacterial spray isn't unique to smokers.

[scns]

It may not be deadly, but female flight attendants become infertile earlier than women working on the ground.

[drzaiusapelord]

Great comment. Way too much of HN is invested in "nanny state bad and corrupt" justified with FUD-like narratives. There's always this low-simmering culture war here. And really, air travel radiation is the hill these types of people want to die on?

The problem with conservative forums like HN is eventually you get on this treadmill of "and so and so isn't so bad" be it alcohol, smoking, Hitler, etc that's a mix of ignorant and purposely dishonest to push agendas. This takes people down some strange and often ignorant and hateful roads, which then helps craft their personalities and core beliefs into something very negative.

The reality is, alcohol is pretty toxic and a health organization really shouldn't recommend a daily allowance of it. I think the cognitive dissonance with people who want to be "right with the science" but also want to drink needs to come out somehow and it often comes out, at least with health issues, with these overly-broad and just weird attacks on groups like the CDC or WHO or whatever. Instead, these people could just admit that "Yes, I do this very unhealthy thing for pleasure and its as unhealthy as the experts say it is." Instead, they'd rather nitpick at random things and reach an irrational conclusion than accept the truth of it all.

On the healthcare end it works the other way like "Here's some unwarranted nitpicking about vaccines," that terminates to a crazed anti-vaxxer position. Its the same kind of dishonesty and leads to the same types of irrational conclusions.

For a lot of people, not only is this how they often think, its the default mode of how they think. They sling mud, project, and attack at any perceived slight against their personal beliefs and the culture war they're always fighting. Its a sign of an emotionally immature mind and these people are everywhere and they build powerful echo chambers. When we see them die of covid as they post facebook memes denying its existence, we then know the fruits of this kind of mental labor. Its dishonestly all the way down.

[ifyoubuildit]

> The problem with conservative forums like HN

Not terribly on topic, but I've been lurking here for more than a decade, and today I learned that it's a conservative forum. And on top of that, it has the same problems inherent to conservative forums (fora?). Weird.

[timpattinson]

While i wouldn't agree that HN is a conservative forum, there is certainly a lot more conservative-leaning material posted here than similar tech-focused forums.

See any thread about California, Texas, diversity & affirmative action, COVID, etc.

[cleansingfire]

This thread was diverted from questioning alcohol as a poison in "any amount " to culture war. This is the borderline astroturfing that destroys communities. Turn every discussion into a political one. I no longer read Slashdot knowing I'll find commenters with more insight than the OP, because they're buried in fragile outrage. Sorry I'm making it worse, just this thread, which should be a few references on each point, became panic and FUD disorientingly fast.

[Brian_K_White]

The pattern only overlaps with conservative on the topics of regulation, maybe taxes, definitely affirmative action.

Everything you said but it's not about conservatism in general or most of the rest of the current conservative platform.

It's just anything that annoys a tech bro who never had a problem in life except that it's a crime that his copycat app was taken down and some girl got a job he thought the world owed him, or he succeeded and believes he did it all himself and doesn't owe anyone else anything.

I mean, it is a large overlap. You could describe both this and the coservative platform as "whatever rationalization works to justify being selfish"

But for instance, I bet almost none of these "conservatives" have a moral or religious objection to sex outside of marriage, sex outside of their race/ethnicity/religion, definitely aren't down at the soup kitchen every wednesday to feed the hungry, never turned the other cheek in their lives, will happily ridicule "preppers" even while researching about data islands...

I think I'm not really articulating my point all that well but hopefully you do still get what I mean despite my weak examples.

[N1H1L]

> Not terribly on topic, but I've been lurking here for more than a decade, and today I learned that it's a conservative forum

Me too.

[01100011]

I understand that the commentary on HN can sometimes be frustrating, but many topics are nuanced and worthy of discussion. If you are looking for a forum which converges on one version of the truth and does nothing but repeat that version of the truth to itself, well, maybe try another discussion forum. If you are not interested in participating in those discussions, it's fine to just keep scrolling or collapse the thread entirely.

[babypuncher]

I think the difference is that there is something to be gained in exchange for the risk posed by cosmic rays during air travel, so people are more interested in taking a nuanced approach to it. Meanwhile second hand smoke is a nuisance at best and a legitimate health concern at worse. Most people (myself included) are happy to ban smoking on airplanes or in restaurants even if the health benefits are negligible at best.

I do agree though, studies like this should always include useful context rather than just making absolutist statements. Perhaps alcohol and tobacco smoke need something similar to the banana equivalent dose used when talking about radiation exposure.

[dleslie]

> Nobody gains anything from an activity that fundamentally requires exposure to tobacco smoke.

Except smokers, of course.

Smoking isn't just addictive and deadly, like alcohol, it has its own appeal to users.

[thrashh]

We’re not talking smoking though

We’re talking second hand smoke

Who exactly is looking to get some second hand smoke in their face while avoiding actually smoking?

[jimmaswell]

I seem to be in a small minority, but I always liked the smell of second hand smoke despite never smoking. I've smelled some cigarettes up close and I think I'd really like them, but I don't want to start for health reasons.

[GekkePrutser]

Me too. I liked the smell. And the bars used to be less 'clear' due to the smoke. They had more atmosphere.

I did hate the way my clothes smelled afterwards but anyway that's what a washing machine is for.

[sneak]

The difference is that you consent to someone else's drugs entering your body.

[shard]

I don't go in for cigarette smoke, but cigars, oh my.

[idontwantthis]

Secondhand smoke is the cost of being in a bar outside of the US. Good luck making friends with European expats without some secondhand smoke.

[afcapel]

In general European countries have bans on smoking in public places much stricter than the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans#Smoking_b...

[meowface]

I don't know what the laws are, but the amount of smoking centimeters away from the entrances of buildings in Europe was staggering to me as an American. Both from patrons and employees. I was breathing in smoke plumes pretty much everywhere.

[idontwantthis]

I wasn’t aware of Europe’s laws but I meant outside of Europe too with European expats. Living in Asia currently and second hand smoke is a big part of my social life.

[babypuncher]

I can't stand the smell of cigarettes, many of them make me feel nauseous. This may be because I'm young enough that public smoking has been banned for most of my life, so I never ever got used to the smell.

[wyclif]

Used to be that bars were the place you went in the US to smoke and drink. Since you can't smoke in bars (Note: "pubs" for UK readers) anymore, there's less of a reason to go to them, and it incentivizes drinking at home. Which has led to a lot of bars closing and fewer of them than ever.

[airstrike]

I don't think we're trying to solve for maximizing the number of bars

[babypuncher]

All the bars where I live seam busy as ever. I don't think smoking bans are hurting them at all.

[tshaddox]

You don't need bars or luck to make friends with European expats.

[tambourine_man]

Europe is the exception here, not the US.

[imtringued]

Isn't smoking a terrible deal, even for smokers? If its just about the nicotine there are lots of ways to get it without ruining your lungs or arteries (inflammation is the easiest way to get heart disease).

[thirdsun]

As a former smoker: It's not just the nicotine, it's also about the ritual, the habit and the social component. Although the latter might have changed these days as smoking has become a lot less popular since then.

[mattmaroon]

The CDC has been unfortunately hopelessly politicized. It happened long before the pandemic.

OTOH, I would make the differentiating point that air travel has positive benefits to society and costs and one has to weigh those against each other. You can’t make the blanket statement “earth would be better off if air travel went away completely.”

It’s hard to find any benefit to smoking, first hand or second, so it’s easy enough to just shit on it. The ROI on whatever ills aviation may have is a topic of discussion, there’s 0 ROI on smoking.

[tomp]

As we've seen in the past 2 years, there's no real positive benefit to society to frequent business flying (at pre-pandemic levels).

Like smoking, we don't need to completely ban air travel. The equivalent would be severely limiting it (for example, prohibiting business flying).

[nitrogen]

there's no real positive benefit to society to frequent business flying

I'm seeing a lot of communication and alignment issues because people can't get into one room and hash things out.

[WalterBright]

I've seen this firsthand many times, too. Having a meeting over beers and longstanding disagreements just melt away.

[ccakes]

> The equivalent would be severely limiting it (for example, prohibiting business flying).

People fly to go on holiday and experience cultures other than their own which is something we should be encouraging rather than discouraging. I strongly agree with reducing needless business travel but if doing so also limited vacation travel I think it'd be a net negative.

[dleslie]

We should be discouraging all air travel. All of it.

[xyzzyz]

No, we shouldn’t. Instead, we should work on ensuring that as many people are able to enjoy new opportunities it provides if they do desire as possible. Everyone should be able to enjoy life.

[wolverine876]

Climate impact is significant. That's going to interfere with generations enjoying their lives.

[dleslie]

In no way is air travel necessary for anyone to find enjoyment in their life or to seek new opportunities, even overseas.

[Fricken]

My favorite thing about air travel is the opportunities it takes away. Destroying the planet is so important to the future of humanity

[airstrike]

> there's no real positive benefit to society to frequent business flying (at pre-pandemic levels).

I'm sorry but I don't buy that. Business flying has obvious benefits including, perhaps obviously, enabling businesses to be run efficiently.

[shard]

I started a new job after the start of COVID, and it has been really hard to build the personal relationships to become fully effective (our offices are spread out globally). My manager has said that pre-COVID days, I would have had the chance to meet many of my colleagues face-to-face and have a few beers with them, which would have greased the wheel to creating some personal connections. It's always easier to request help from someone who has a good impression of you.

Similarly with clients. It's much easier for people to go on attack-mode when they are displeased when it's only through email or a video conference where people have their cameras off. Unhappy clients can be placated and turned towards working together to a solution much more easily in person, and happy clients can be turned into long term partners more easily over dinner and friendly chats. This is especially true of customers in Asia.

[TameAntelope]

This isn't politics, it's safety. I accept the argument that the CDC has become overly innumerate in how to live a healthy life, but it's not a liberal or conservative idea to be cautious.

[area51org]

There is such a thing as being unnecessarily and overly cautious, however. This sure seems like a good example of that.

[hcurtiss]

Exactly. Precaution comes at a price. The question is whether the benefits of the precaution outweigh the costs. And that is an answer science cannot, and should not, answer. These days, it seems, many scientists are desperate to cloak their policy preferences in "science." That is precisely why there is presently so much distrust of scientists.

[psyklic]

I never understood distrust, because scientists base their work on research that is extensively cited. Making conclusions that are not supported by evidence, e.g. "desperately cloaking" policy preferences, could jeopardize one's scientific career.

Many people seem to unrealistically demand scientific recommendations to be "guarantees." However, scientific conclusions are very precisely made best guesses, built on humanity's knowledge.

[klabb3]

> I never understood distrust, because scientists base their work on research that is extensively cited.

It's good that the supply chain of science is traceable, but it doesn't guarantee truth by any means. Their are many non-scientific human endeavors that have traceability, take software development for instance.

I think the distrust comes from many fields having fairly obvious political trends, in particular social sciences. Another source of distrust is overextrapolation of science by authorities. For instance, science might say that certain drugs are harmful if abused, and politicians may use that to claim the war on drugs is based on science, which obviously is not true. Lastly, some fields struggle producing consistent and falsifiable results, such as economics and psychology.

[crocodiletears]

Choosing the level of safety we enforce in society is inherently political.

[noirbot]

There was a comment I saw the other day along the lines of "Science will tell you what the numbers are, but doesn't make a judgement of how big that number should be."

You can get a pretty good estimate of how many lives would be saved if we smoked less, or drank less, or did any number of other things, but ultimately that's an input into a public policy decision making system that doesn't have a provably right answer unless everyone involved agrees on what the desired outcome is.

[cleansingfire]

Nobody is enforcing anything, either in the parent or the OP, so don't panic. Your comment seems inflammatory and irrelevant in this context, but I'm sure that's not your intent. You'll be ok, don't worry.

[josephcsible]

Safety becomes politics once acting in "unsafe" ways becomes illegal.

[zdragnar]

Nicotine (especially when consumed via smoking) has some negative side effects, but is also a neurotrophic and can be quite beneficial.

Addiction and blood pressure are really the only downsides if you were to consume it in the form of, say, gum (and boy does the addiction suck).

[krrrh]

Regular consumption of nicotine also reduces Alzheimer's risk (and probably Parkinson's). This has been known for a long time. Few things are absolute.

1991: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1670208/

> The risk of Alzheimer's disease decreased with increasing daily number of cigarettes smoked before onset of disease (relative risk 0.3 in those smoking greater than 21/day v 1 in non-smokers). In six families in which the disease was apparently inherited as an autosomal dominant disorder, the mean age of onset was 4.17 years later in smoking patients than in non-smoking patients from the same family (p = 0.03).

There is also ongoing research on this topic funded by the US government.

https://www.alzheimers.gov/clinical-trials/memory-improvemen...

[kortex]

Nit: that study is cigarettes. There is more to tobacco than nicotine, such as harmala alkaloids and miscellaneous MAOIs.

Either way, that's super interesting.

[drekk]

The addiction is one of the most difficult to quit. With repeated use the nice feelings stop as well. There's no benefit to it, you're hijacking some neural circuitry until it hijacks your life

[artificialLimbs]

>> It's hard to find any benefit to smoking...

Ritualistically, as an exercise in getting out of one's 'normal' consciousness, it can present useful information for self study. In habitual form, it is of course very destructive.

[groby_b]

So the "getting out of consciousness" that is the relaxation experience many "habitual" smokers have is worthless, while changing your state for ritualistic purposes is helpful?

Both are very tiny self-reported effects that are close to non-observable for outsiders. Why would one outweigh the other, if you allow self-reported epsilon effects at all?

[artificialLimbs]

>> getting out of consciousness

You mean sleep (as in, night time bed activity)? I'm not talking about sleep. I am discussing getting out of normative modes of being but not going to sleep.

>> that is the relaxation experience

This is not the only experience resulting from tobacco use. There are more subtle effects as well.

>> worthless

I haven't declared a value judgment against the habit. I am saying it is destructive to the body. Do you believe that to not be a fact?

>> helpful

Again, I'm not presenting value judgments here. I am saying it can present useful information. It sounds to me like you have taken offense somewhere for some reason. I am not putting weight on one or the other.

*edit: clarity

[wolverine876]

> The CDC has been unfortunately hopelessly politicized.

These accusations are a common way to tear down democratic institutions, handing power to corporations and powerful individuals. Do you have evidence of it? I've seen none, other than some things attempted by political appointees during the Trump administration.

[mattmaroon]

Yes. If you want a really good explanation of how it happened and the effects it’s practically the subject of The Premonition by Michael Lewis

[pirate787]

The CDC (formally Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has long tried to enter the gun control debate. That has nothing to do with their mission of communicable disease prevention. Congress has repeatedly voted to block them.

[wolverine876]

The wider medical community has been vocal about gun control, because guns are a leading cause of injury and death. The fact that it's not a virus or bacteria is arguably a pointless technicality, incidental to saving people's lives. The people who catch the 'bullet' disease are treated at hospitals by doctors.

You may not think it's appropriate, but many doctors disagree. There's nothing in that indicating it's politicized; people may want to politicize gun control, Coronavirus, and lots of other health issues, but that doesn't make the health institutions political for dealing with it. (They also want to politicize the CDC and every other democratic institution (the Post Office, etc.).)

[chana_masala]

Should CDC also be involved in traffic laws too?

[HWR_14]

They are not involved in writing traffic laws, but they most certainly are involved in researching traffic caused injuries. It makes sense, because they are a leading cause of death

[glennpratt]

"Involved in laws" doesn't really describe the CDC exactly, but whatever.

One example of many:

https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about_sleep/drowsy_driving.html

[HWR_14]

The CDC is still the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's mission includes but is not limited to infectious disease. Congress has mandated they cover, in addition to infectious disease, research on food borne pathogens, environmental effects on health, occupational safety, injury prevention and how best to promote health. They do research on, for example, obesity and diabetes which are noncommunicable. They also are tasked with education to improve the health of US citizens (or residents, it's unclear). They specifically and explicitly replaced the National Communicable Disease Center, as their mission grew.

Meanwhile, all they've tried to do is research gun violence, not "enter a debate".

[hidudeurcool]

benefit of smoking is the buzz and social enhancement. it is not useless.

[avar]

> It’s hard to find any benefit to smoking, first hand or second.

The same is true about recreational travel. People expose themselves to high levels of radiation and travel risk purely for recreational purposes. Smokers inhale carcinogenic substances for recreational purposes.

[kaba0]

Is the risk for the two even remotely in the same ballpark?

[pas]

No, but the problem is that a scientifically informed (evidence based) public health site communicating risks should be consistent and shouldn't use inconsistent absolutist language.

[pvarangot]

Well, it depends on how much you smoke and how much you travel. Thing is if I smoke even one cigarette like as a digestive after a big dinner once every four months I have to pay 600 dollars of extra health insurance per year because of how all this bullshit messaging about how nicotine works. And of course it's to protect something like only 35% of the human population that will get addicted to it.

I stopped smoking for months or years many times and I never ever had any side effect except maybe I'm a bit tired the first days. I don't even put up extra weight or anything like that. I feel like an adult baby being treated like I need financial punishment to help me be a healthy person.

[HWR_14]

> Thing is if I smoke even one cigarette like as a digestive after a big dinner once every four months I have to pay 600 dollars of extra health insurance per year because of how all this bullshit messaging about how nicotine works.

Really? Where do you live? Because I'm not aware of any country that does this (other than with sin taxes on tobacco).

[pvarangot]

I live in the US and the 600 extra are binary, the question is "have you used any tobacco products in the past three months?" and a yes means an extra 600 per year. It's not that unusual if you get health insurance through your employer because it drives the cost down for everyone else, and of course scamming money off smokers even if they just casually do it a couple of times every three months is socially accepted.

Also except executives no one is above 60, which is where one would argue that if you are a smoker you may actually needing to tap heavy into health insurance money for smoking related conditions. There's even research that if you quit before 40 your smoking related cancer risks go down 90% https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20211228/qui...

Of course I can drink a bottle of wine per day, not exercise, eat processed meat and not consume a gram of fiber and I don't have to pay extra health insurance. It doesn't make any sense.

[avar]

Health insurance in various places goes up if you consume tobacco products, and doesn't take the amount consumed into account:

https://www.kff.org/faqs/faqs-health-insurance-marketplace-a...

[josephcsible]

> Well, it depends on how much you smoke and how much you travel.

I find it hard to believe that smoking could be less dangerous than flying even for people who work as airline pilots or flight attendants.

[pvarangot]

Smoking every day? Sure it's more dangerous. Vaping at a party once per month? I don't think so.

[scoofy]

If you want to feel some dissonance about this dissonance, you might note that a meta-analysis was done on the evidence that using a parachute is effective at saving your life when jumping from an aircraft. It's a real, but satirical approach to worshiping randomized controlled trials for things that should effectively be obvious. There are obvious limits to empiricism, and we shouldn't proudly flaunt lack of evidence ≠ evidence of absence in cases where it's perfectly reasonable to expect results. I mean, we could be wrong about theses things, but it would be a shift in thinking akin to newtonian -> einsteinian physics.

Paper: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial

Conclusions: Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice.

>https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

[Mathnerd314]

As the paper's title says, it's a randomized controlled trial, not a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis would likely exclude the RCT due to poor experimental design.

[scoofy]

You are correct, but a meta-analysis would still suggest that there is no evidence that parachutes protect people jumping out of airplanes, because we don’t have evidence because we can’t have evidence.

[Mathnerd314]

Actually meta-analyses are not limited to RCTs - in my experience they can be quite subjective.

So for example, a meta-analysis might say that there's a fair amount of evidence that people not wearing parachutes die after falling from airplanes (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/26/story-an-afg...), and plenty of evidence that people can land successfully with a parachute (skydiving videos, too many to count). The conclusion would be a strong correlation between parachute use and not dying. The only thing there isn't is an RCT, to prove that the correlation is causal. The purpose of the parachute RCT paper seems to be to prove that the design of an RCT is just as fallible as any other reasoning that attempts to prove causality, so in fact RCTs are not the "gold standard" and other forms of reasoning may be just as valid. (e.g. basic physics in the case of the parachute)

[scoofy]

>basic physics

I totally agree, the point that organizations like the World Heart Federation are using. We are taking basic physics as a truism, but it's the result of experimentation, which creates a framework. The same is done for the way the body functions. That framework can be used to make sweeping statements about alcohol / ionizing radiation, etc.

I've been totally blown away recently listing to This Week in Virology, as the panel of experts regularly discuss their concerns about how many people are discussing the viral/vaccine mechanics as though the framework we have of disease is perfect. It's always fascinating to hear what absurdly qualified people have concerns about when discussing their area of expertise.

[spider-mario]

To be clear, the problem here is in equating “evidence” with randomized controlled trials. We have plenty of evidence that parachutes work, just not in the form of RCTs.

David Gorski of sciencebasedmedicine.org calls it “methodolatry”:

https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1484220420295376900

https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1479900075602194445

https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1483268592674217986

[spacemark]

Good points. If I can take a crack at the exercise for the reader, I think the inconsistency has fairly straight forward reasons, even if they're frustrating: humans are terrible at reasoned risk analysis (if they even see the value); people prefer absolutes and easy heuristics to "it depends"; most people have first-hand experience with the extremes of smoking and drinking and it's thus easy to vilify; the best defense of vice is pleasure, which isn't much of a defense in the eyes of many, whereas exposure to pollution and cosmic rays is impossible to prevent without giving up near-universally valued things (transportation, energy).

We see similar patterns with nuclear power, climate change, and pandemics...

[temporalparts]

Have you actually done research differentiating between the risks of tobacco exposure and radiation exposure?

There's no scientific evidence to suggest that small doses of radiation (< 0.1 mSv) is harmful to you, at all. In fact, there's even scientific evidence to suggest the opposite, it's called radiation hormesis.

[ineedasername]

I think the reason one bothers us and another doesn't (in the case off smoking) relates to the level of non-contradiction evidence. It's been decades since the pseudo-research propaganda from the tobacco industry was taken seriously, and lots of legitimate research to go along with that.

Alcohol on the other hand seems to produce a fair number of contradictory studies on a regular basis. There are pretty clear negative effects of excessive use, but at the low-to-moderate levels it's a lot murkier. It's especially hard to know from some studies whether or not the proposed negative impact was caused by alcohol or whether alcohol use was a type of proxy variable for general health and lifestyle.

[notahacker]

It seems the reason they've gone for the "no amount of alcohol is good for" precisely because of the existence and popular influence of contradictory claims. They're taking the position that it's the negative effects that have the plausible mechanisms and the associations of low-to-moderate use with sometimes better outcomes than abstinent cohorts that are most likely proxy variables for general health and [former] lifestyle.

(c.f. absolutely no pop-science reporting on supposed therapeutic benefits of cosmic radiation from frequent flying, so the average person hearing about it is likely to overestimate its negative effects rather than wonder if they should be booking a flight with every meal!)

[ausername42027]

There is robust data that the risk of first-hand smoke is not a linear relationship between cancer (and other bad stuff) and dose--no amount of smoking is safe.

To be frank you are uninformed on basic statistics as well as medicine.

You are doing the standard thing that many educated people do when they think they are smarter and more informed than they are. You dress up a bad take as if you found some secret (CDC's hypocritical language) and assume that a mathematical relationship exists ("obviously exposure to bad stuff carries linear risk"), when it is actually more complex than that (if we can call a binary relationship more complex than linear lol).

[lixtra]

> bad stuff carries linear risk

This is a straw man. I believe that a lot of stuff carries continuous risk going up from zero and increasing with dosage. If a substance does not start with zero risk at zero dose, it is most likely not a toxin but an essential (i.e. vitamin A).

Very few substances are so rare that the discreteness might matter for practical purposes.

To portray the risk as binary, centered at zero is certainly wrong. You also would have a very hard time to find study subjects who have never been exposed to a few particles of smoke.

[jliptzin]

That doesn’t mean it’s not linear to some degree; surely 24 cigarettes a day is worse than 1 a week.

[hn_throwaway_99]

While I somewhat agree with your overall point, level of control is important here. I can choose whether to get on a plane or take a drink. I can't control if someone farts standing next to me, or if they exhale smoke in my face.

[ABeeSea]

Did you look at any of the references at the bottom of the page? There are many, many dozens of studies in the report by the surgeon general. On page 421 when they analyze lung cancer risk, they have studies with volume and frequency of second hand smoke based on the volume and frequency of the smoking habits of the one spouse being a smoker and the other being a non smoker.

[kaba0]

I can choose to take a flight or consume alcohol, but I can’t choose to not breathe while you smoke next to me. There is no need to look for conspiracy theories as homework.

[slingnow]

In case you missed it, the claim has nothing to do with choice -- it has to do with making a blanket, absolute statement for one thing and a more nuanced statement for another.

I guess you're exactly the person these types of statements were meant to placate.

[kaba0]

As a public statement, mathematical existence of risk may, if small enough, can very well be said to be non-existing. For all practical purposes, is a 1e-10 risk contain any sort of information for the average people? Is it lying to call it risk-free? I really don’t think so, human language is not exact - in the real world nothing would be risk-free otherwise, essentially we would loose that word.

[Xixi]

Just speculating here, but doesn't it have something to do with accumulation in the body? Your body obviously can't accumulate radiations. It also does process and eliminate the like of ethanol and many other substances. That's not the case, I believe, for heavy metals like mercury, lead or arsenic, that are eliminated much more slowly (if at all?).

That's why you can enjoy lychees by eating a few everyday if you fancy it, and will only poison yourself if you eat a lot at once. But you can poison someone by exposing them to a little bit of arsenic everyday (at least in the movies, not sure how true it is...)

I think tar from smoke accumulates, and there is a lot of it in second-hand smoke.

Obviously not a doctor, so I'm probably completely wrong...

[robocat]

The damage from smoking is accumulative. I have noticed it in the skin of young female smokers after a few years of heavy smoking. You can see it's affects on some other parts of the body over longer periods.

Drinking a lot of alcohol has a similar effects as tobacco on your health, and on the skin. If you know a heavy drinker then they quit for six months and then you see their face, there is noticeable rejuvenation. There are patterns of looks to older people that drink at pubs frequently.

[spider-mario]

You might enjoy this excerpt from E. T. Jaynes’ book “Probability Theory: The Logic of Science”:

https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf#page=16 (the section that starts with “What is ‘safe’?”)

[ethanbond]

This would be a very meaningful comparison if people were regularly forcing a diner-full of people to hop on a plane with them several times per year.

[dionidium]

Obviously the analogy to getting on the plane is walking in the diner.

[Forgeties79]

I think we can all agree there are stronger arguments for air travel than habitual smoking of cigarettes.

[slingnow]

Do you live somewhere that forces you inside of diners several times per year? I'm interested in where that is.

[quantgenius]

Smoking by a person may or may not create benefits for the person smoking. However, secondhand smoke creates no positives and significant net negatives (the smell, the accumulation of black deposits on clothes of things around you) for anyone who encounters it even if you ignore the health effects.

It can also create pretty serious immediate issues beyond just the long term problems for people with breathing issues like asthma or certain allergies. If smoking and second hand smoke were everywhere, like it was in 80s and early 90s in the US, and you were one of the fairly large percentage of the population with these issues, you basically couldn't go anywhere without risking your health.

If the second hand inhaler were a child, it's an even more serious problem. Nicotine is highly addictive and does a real number on your brain. It makes addicted smokers justify things to themselves due to the sheer physical need and you end up with parents smoking around young kids etc.

Even if you are a libertarian, you should support restrictions on smoking consistent with the principle that each of us has freedom but your freedom to swing your fist only extends as far as my nose.

Alcohol is a bit different. Unless the drinker starts behaving badly after drinking, or there are long term issues like alcoholism that affect the whole family, they are really only hurting themselves.

[justatdotin]

yes but these three (radiation, smoke, alcohol) are very different hazards with quite different modes of harm