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Comment by billfruit | Hacker News Reader

I am somewhat bothered about the reverse scenario. For example e-cigarettes, some people are eager to quote statistical data on it, but I feel we should be able to state if e-cigarettes are harmful or not from a purely theoritical standpoint, an explanation on how it interacts with the chemistry of the human body and say it is harmful or not.

We didn't send the man to the Moon on the basis of statistical experiments, we knew it was possible even before the first screw was put in on the rocket.

I am fearful that depending on experiments would lead to the same dire credibility issues that plague experimental psychology.

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The human body (and biology more generally) is fractal-like in its complexity. One day we may be able to model things accurately enough to not require experimental work, but probably not in our lifetime.

Knowledgeable medical scientists should be able to explain the effects of vaping as a physiological process, axiomatically. Are we saying our medical scientists do not want to attempt that?

"Vapours" actually were a major thing in medical research once, cured by bloodletting and mercury IIRC.

There are all sort of models still widely believed today. Some are unassailable (evolution, germ theory), some seem right more often than not ("don't eat bacon"), and some seem so right but nothing based on them works ("cholesterol is bad").

So this sort of naive belief in our ability to model the processes in a body or a cell has out of fashion at least since WW2. It's still used to come up with ideas to try. But even there, purely random exploration of the search space is not consistently worse.

Modelling the basics of a human lung isn't all that difficult. You can see the effects of vaping on an enclosed space just by having the smoke pulled into an enclosed space like they used to do for cigarettes. That would give you substances created though the vaping process and likely to stick in the lungs. Longer term effects are drastically harder obviously as it doesn't take into account the cleaning mechanisms in the lungs but for basic verification that something is toxic that's not a difficult bridge to cross.

Now when you get into whole body or things with mutations such as cancer I agree with you while heartedly. While we can understand in a petri dish how to kill something in a human you've got to worry about things like delivery, hidden single cells, toxicity, and drug proliferation all of which can be different in every single person with a cancer. In biotech we're still just barely out of the dark ages.

To bring this to the original topic, we're still in the dark ages with fields like economics. While we understand many of levers that exist we have little idea of how and when to effectively pull them.

Models are useful tools, but at the end of the day you’re not going to get a conclusive answer to a question like “what are the impacts of vaping on human health?” without looking at a real life human. At least at current levels of scientific understanding, being able to plug a chemical into an equation and pop out a complete description of the effects (my interpretation of what the gp is asking for) is a bit of a pipe dream.

> but I feel we should be able to state if e-cigarettes are harmful or not from a purely theoritical standpoint, an explanation on how it interacts with the chemistry of the human body and say it is harmful or not.

I agree with the sentiment but the truth is ballistics is several order of magnitude simpler than biology/biochemistry. I find medicine fascinating, but the more I learn about it the more I am astonished at the huge mismatch between perception of the field and what we actually know. And have always more respect for practitioners.

> Paracetamol was first made in 1877.[21] It is the most commonly used medication for pain and fever in both the United States and Europe.

> How it works is not entirely clear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol

> I am fearful that depending on experiments would lead to the same dire credibility issues that plague experimental psychology.

Economics already has huge credibility problems.

Theoretically I would agree. Medical science mostly just tried it in clinical studies. Of paramount important though is that the patient makes the decision to take the risk. This is were economics is lacking in my opinion.

But even if you are sure you got the model right, you still need a long time study to prove it. The current discussion on e-cigs are mostly about informing people that they are taking a risk because there are unanswered questions.

Putting a man on the moon was a lot of risk and there were many unknowns and I am sure the pilots knew that very well. Gladly, they still did it.

> experimental psychology

had precisely the problem that their patients often didn't really have a choice in that matter. So I think the field deserves its place. They might need to shed a lot of hubris before they can be taken seriously again. I wouldn't put economics on that level, but they often seem to gravitate to similar mistakes.

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