The history of “How to Lie with Smoking Statistics” (2014)
refsmmat.com
refsmmat.com
“This is the man they rely on—Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany; I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius—he could disprove gravity.”
Of the studies that I've seen, nicotine actually is quite healthy and has many upsides: increased working memory and recall, preventive against dementia and parkinson's, and a mild mood stabilizer/anti-psychotic.
Though there are far worse compounds in tobacco, nicotine is hardly 'healthy' - it entails a number of undesirable side effects. Long term use induces negative cardiovascular conditions (with rather noticeable acute effects on heart rate, blood pressure, blood lipid profile, and blood circulation in the extremities), directly contributing to atherosclerosis and dramatically increasing the risk of heart attack, strokes, and blood clots. It negatively impacts adolescent brain development, and contributes to a variety of harmful neonatal and womens' reproductive issues.
That isn't to say that it doesn't have value as a nootropic - I'm an occasional user exactly for that purpose. But spreading the false notion that nicotine is somehow a 'healthy' substance is at odds with medical science.
And seriously, if you've ever smoked 2-3 packs of cigarettes and get weird desires to have a cigarette, you've experienced nicotine's addicting qualities. It's so subtle at first that most people just don't realize they're addicted.
Chemically, no. Epidemiologically, yes. In the real world, the more nicotine a person consumes, the greater their risk of lung cancer. We know that it isn't because of the nicotine per se, it is more likely all the other junk in cigarette smoke, but the lack of a direct chemical link doesn't mean there isn't a solid scientific link. (Vaping also involves lots of unknown junk, just different junk. Inhaling hot random chemicals probably isn't a good idea either way.)
With lots of medical "links" the specifics of the biology can remain mysterious while still being sound science. The link between aging and cancer isn't fully understood, but any doc anywhere would say that cancer risk increases with age. We don't need to completely understand the mechanism to recognize and react to the evidence.
Somewhat related, there's a great article in Mental Floss on the scientist who helped get rid of leaded fuel despite the industry's "scientific" pushback. Wonderful read. http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scienti...
From the linked article:
"There are many possible explanations for the sudden demise of Huff’s book. The industry realized in 1968 that it had a credibility problem: the public was unlikely to trust a book funded and promoted by the Tobacco Institute. Perhaps the campaign was shelved after Tiderock closed up shop. Perhaps it was too late—some tobacco regulations had already been passed, others were inevitable, and new tactics were needed. Or perhaps the thought of legal trouble made them retract their offer to advertise the book, making Macmillan kill the project. But Macmillan was on the brink of signing a contract with Huff. Did they have second thoughts, or was Huff told to kill the project? Or were the Tiderock consultants correct in their assessment that “this mass of verbiage needs drastic editing” and was unpublishable without serious revision? The Documents Library offers no clues. Only documents produced or received by the industry are included, so any correspondence between Huff and Macmillan may not appear. Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University, reviewed the ethics of Huff’s involvement with the industry and suggested Huff could have intentionally killed the project to save his own reputation, which would have been destroyed by his association with tobacco.2 But just a few months before the book’s demise he had been fighting for a prestigious hardcover and better royalties. Whatever the reasons, How to Lie with Smoking Statistics went unpublished, protecting its better-known sibling How to Lie with Statistics from guilt by association."
Would the original book have commanded the same respect, if associated with another which would bascially be an example of what the first was meaning to expose?
Well, in the real world, it's 99% the latter.
Follow the money. GMO opponents usually have skin in the game.
It's a lot less easy to make the connection to, say, Amazon (or whoever else). And even if you do, still, fuck Monsanto.
Point is that when you're going off gut feeling (which you most likely are on some level unless you yourself are very knowledgeable on the topic), it's often going to come down to which pockets you hate the most. And, well, fuck Monsanto.
But just to be clear and as I was saying in my other post: you're right; both sides of the issue have deep pockets. The problem is it doesn't look that way at first glance.
I'm not in favor of organic food either. Almost everything with opponents and proponents is a false dichotomy marketed to suckers.
Be mindful of what you read, coldtea.
Who said I'm not?
I don't trust any corporation/government to build a safe reactor. They have failed repeatedly. The "this time is different", "modern designs have solved past problems" I don't buy, those claims have been made repeatedly too (and failed). I don't try the lowest bidder procurements, and I don't trust our understanding of risks (from terrorism to severe earthquakes to some idiot making a huge mistake).
I also don't think we have any solution to the thousands of years byproduct of nuclear waste. Especially since we've had several scandals of big companies belonging to various mafias just being paid to dispose it and dumping it to the sea. Or routinely passed through cities, despite protocol.
As for the claims of various "green power" schemes, I take those with large grains of salt too. Same for oil and coal (which at least has no big breakpoint like nuclear has, just a constant shitty pollution factor).
Maybe in the US. As a frenchman, I beg to disagree :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
He also relied pretty heavily on arguments that correlation is not causation because smokers are genetically predisposed to smoke, and may also be predisposed to cancer and other maladies. He even quoted R.A. Fisher's argument that people smoke to quell irritation and annoyance, and having a chronic inflammation or cancer might just be the kind of irritation that makes you subconsciously want to smoke.
No number of enormous well-conducted observational studies would prevent Huff from making up scenarios for other types of confounding. Check out Chapter 12 of the book.
These aren't samples. The cause of death registry includes all deaths and the cancer registry includes everyone who's been diagnosed with cancer, even people who received no treatment. This means that studies that investigate e.g. cancer caused by smoking and use these data sources are nationwide rather than sampled.
The article is sadly owned by the journal, which does allow authors to post pre-prints on their personal sites.
The book I'm not so sure about. I spent some time researching the copyright status back when I wrote the article, and the results were confusing. I don't think Huff ever registered copyright for How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, which was required at the time, but unpublished works were protected, and when the copyright system changed in the 70s unpublished works were given some statutory protections. The book only became public because of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which I haven't read but presumably sets some conditions on the documents it makes public.
In the end I decided it was safest to link to the Tobacco Documents Library, though I was very tempted to typeset a new edition of the book so we could enjoy an example of corporate propaganda.