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Comment by i_have_an_idea | Hacker News Reader

What if you substituted "steel" with "asbestos" in your argument.

Asbestos, lead paint, cigarettes, heroin(perscribed generously for basically whatever the doc felt like), "Radithor" (patent medicine containing radium-226 and 228, marketed as a "perpetual sunshine" energy tonic and cure for over 150 diseases), bloodletting, mercury treatments for syphilis, tobacco smoke enemas (yep that was a real thing), milk-based blood transfusions.

Didn't understand those either and used the fuck out of them because "the experts" said we should.

This is why I believe we should only listen to amateur opinions on everything, experts simply lack historical credibility. For example I've recently purchased a healing crystal (half off) for only $5000 dollars! It cleared up the imbalanced energies my street guru told me about right away.

I would never have been made aware about the consequences of imbalanced energies in the first place if I had asked an expert instead. They probably wouldn't even suggest an immediate solution to the problem like my reliable street guru always does! Something to consider.

Ironically the street guru hucksters might have a better track record than the dangerous products mentioned above.

Less charitably, it's a mistake to imply that simply being a bigger corporation makes you go from street guru to "expert". Bigger company trying to make money off of you at any risk to you is just the same bucket at a different scale. In this context the other side is probably "expert consumer advocate" since that fits the idea above of these dangerous products advertised as cure alls.

I honestly agree with you in many respects, I'm simply spinning in some nuance to a topic I keep seeing.

The snake oil salesmen is productive precisely because the actual effects of the snake oil they are selling is unknown to the consumer they are introducing it to. There isn't easy answers to this, it's just a fact of life that we can try our best mitigate.

And apparently fish oil actually does help your brain. Weird world we live in.

So I think the focus on "experts" is actually a consequence of declining institutional credentialism. You didn't trust them for claiming to be experts, you trusted the institutions who called them experts and said you should trust them for that reason. But expertise implies competence not trust. Not everyone operates with good intentions even with the right credentials, including many institutions themselves.

It can be worse in terms of justice. You might be able to charge or win in court against a street hustler. Most people can't beat a big company in court. They usually won't even try.

Smoking cigarettes didn’t really matter for as long as we were regularly burning wood for fuel. Turns out just burning pretty much anything and breathing in the particles is really bad for you. Makes sense we didn’t realize it was bad until we stopped burning logs and coal for home heating and cooking.

Cigarettes actually are uniquely bad when it comes to lung cancer. Lung cancer was very rare in 1900 and before when everyone was still burning wood or coal for warmth and cooking. Lung cancer rates didn’t take off until cigarette popularity exploded after WWI.

Chewing tobacco also causes mouth cancer, so there’s more to it than just inhaling byproducts of combustion.

Also scientists were recognizing the link decades before governments finally caved and regulated the industry and decades more before those industries were significantly curtailed by limiting advertising.

Then they bought a new brand name and started running the same playbook.

From what I remember reading chewing tobacco is orders of magnitude less cancer causing than smoking. So much so, that some groups see it as harmful to lump it in with smoking or vaping. If you really need some nic, popping a zyn is probably the least harmful way to get it.

Do these… ”groups”, which would rather you not lump chewing tobacco together with other tobacco products… manufacture and sell chewing tobacco?

1) people smoked a lot more in the post WWI econ boom

2) additives or even just paper compound the negative effects of the smoke on the lungs.

like, firefighters - who usually have physical fitness requirements and don't smoke - see rates of lung cancer similar to moderate smokers, simply due to the higher volume of particulate and chems hitting their lungs.

it is dose-dependant, and firefighers who see more fires see more cancer. occasional tobacco pipe smokers in 1850 saw less lung cancer than 2-pack-a-day post-WW2 smokers.

I’m unsure where your firefighters have the same lung cancer risk as moderate smokers information comes from, but it’s wrong.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7063017/

Here’s an meta-analysis of 49 studies that shows no increase in lung cancer.

And of course it’s dose dependent. But newer studies show that years smoking is much more important than intensity when it comes to lung cancer risk. So smoking half a pack a day for 20 years is worse than a pack a day for 10 years.

Dry snuff comes with a 2-8x increase in oral cancer and a 10-12x increase in nasal and sinus cancer.

Tobacco is a carcinogen—even without additives. In addition to epidemiological evidence we have a plausible mechanism of action.

Alkaloids in the leaf convert into carcinogenic TSNAs during curing, aging, or drying. Tobacco plants absorbs heavy metals. And tobacco plants absorb polonium-210.

There’s a lot of misinformation and misleading interpretations out there that come from years of the tobacco industry attempting to create uncertainty. Especially with your firefighter myth, I think you might have got hold of some of it.

Steel has almost always (as in 99.99...% of the time) delivered to our expectations based on our understanding of it.

The cases where we built something out of steel and it failed are _massively_ outnumbered by the instances where we used it where/when suitable. If we built something in steel and it failed/someone died we stopped doing that pretty soon after.

This is partly due to having a safety factor: i.e. using twice as much steel as you think you need.

Understanding means knowing the limits of your own understanding, and building in safeguards.

asbestos also delivered, and did a great job, at its intended functions.

fire retardant, keeps the rats out. flawless performance.

people working around it get sick but lots of people get sick, why is that a problem?

Yeah but well you see, humans did not go extinct from just asbestos!

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