The Fireplace Delusion

Home defense, hunting, on-person defense for women in unsafe areas, etc.

But yeah, continue on your screed. Let's not let facts get in the way of a good diatribe.

If I recall, in some countries, the only legal guns are rifles--because they can be used to hunt game. Or, to put a finer point on it: some people use a gun to feed their family.

What is the useful purpose of a swimming pool exactly? Are you proposing that they are a meaningful part of our society? Is this "use" so valuable that it clearly outweighs the deaths it causes? You seem to in your own comment think the bicycle provides the same benefit, so why keep pools if we have such a great alternative? No one swims a gun, but no one swims to work either. At least there are people actually dependent on bikes because they can't afford cars.

> We can't eliminate all the risk. > We can eliminate unnecessary risk (like guns).

So you think pools qualify as a necessary risk then?

Is it at all possible that you may just personally see no use in guns while appreciating the recreational value of a pool despite its risks, while at the exact same time a gun owner may see no use in pools while appreciating the recreational value of guns? You can't swim (useless activity) in a gun. You also can't fire a pool.

I can actually perfectly understand the argument "well, both guns and pools should be outlawed then". I really have a hard time shrugging off pool deaths because they are such a clearly useful thing that is a necessary risk for society though (however that argument works much better for car deaths vs. gun deaths).

Edit: Below I was just commenting on understanding your audience and thus not making arguments that won't resonate with them. There is an entire culture around gun ownership. There are some people that go shooting every day, and it really hurts your position to tell them that that part of their life is not a valid "use". It is actually quite similar to football in some respects. At some point in this country we may have to discuss the very real health issues associated with it, and a part of the framing of that argument should probably not belittle the attachment people have to something that is in fact quite useless (as any and all recreations are to the people that don't practice them).

And you can't kill your potential killer or rapist, unless you invite him in the pool and hope he drowns, with pools being dangerous and all. I hope you never have to wish you had a gun near you. Personally I have no pool, but...

Pools, unless they are Olympic size ones used to do laps for most people are useless, "just [extremely dangerous] fun." Fun, like shooting a gun which also can save your life, or the life or your neighbor. Mighty useful if you ask me and much safer than pools.

Yes they do. Some people enjoy firing them, therefore their useful purpose is to make people happy (which at the end of the day the same end purpose for everything people do). Ditto with pools -- some people like swimming, so they also fulfil the useful purpose of making people happy.

I'm sorry that you're so obtuse that you can't understand what that purpose is.

Correction: guns have no useful purpose that you can personally imagine (or that you are personally willing to accept).

Yes, I am a gun owner. I own three rifles, and at least two have a clear utility argument:

1. .22lr is for basic practice (aiming, breathing control, etc.) at low expense.

2. .270 is for hunting deer. Where I live, there are more whitetail deer than there were when Europeans first arrived on this continent, and the only way to keep that population under control is by hunting. Deer are the cause of numerous automobile accidents and cause quite a bit of property damage. In some suburban areas where deer hunting is not allowed, towns occasionally hire people to exterminate deer because they have become pests.

Right there, you have useful purposes for a large class of firearms. Killing pests on farms is another common use of rifles.

"We can eliminate unnecessary risk (like guns)."

So what you are saying is that anyone with children should not be a hunter or farmer, or that they should store their guns somewhere other than their home (and hope they are not stolen)?

The problem with your argument is that it is a blanket statement -- you are talking about guns as a general thing, which covers little BB guns all the way up to naval canons. Some guns have immediate and obvious civil uses, but you leave no room for that.

Well, that's just like, your opinion man. Other people have other uses for guns, like recreational shooting. Kinda like motorcycles increase traffic deaths but are hobbies for some people, and useless to others.

Using Consumer Product Safety Commission 2008 numbers for drowning, and the anti-gun group Children's Defense fund numbers for firearm deaths.

http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroom/News-Releases/2012/New-CPSC-...

http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publicat...

You should really be using the number who were killed by a gun kept in their home for this comparison. Also, there are other ways to die in a pool aside from drowning.

I don't understand. This seems sensible to me. Why wouldn't we include this figure to calculate risk? Isn't risk a matter of incidences/exposures?

The real questions is, of the people who are within harms way of home swimming pools, how many suffer injuries, and of the people who are within harms way of fire arms, how many suffer injuries.

Both are not that easy to measure, especially firearms, but looking at absolute causes of death is clearly nonsense.

Cars are getting more survivable, and almost certainly safer, too, but do numerical comparisons with numbers from the past remain valid in light of external influences on these outcomes?

In this case, improvements in trauma care may mask both brain injury from lack of oxygen and serious disability from gun accidents in this comparison. Or we don't know the methodology and they could be counting ER visits, which might provide a better comparison.

We're talking about choices an individual homeowner can make.

Those choices are "install a pool" or "keep a gun in the house".

To understand the risks for those two choices, total drownings and total gun deaths of children in the country aren't relevant to an individual's choice.

To get a useful statistic, you need to know how many children died in their home pool in the sample group of homeowners w/ pools, and how many children died from a gun in the home in the sample group of homeowners w/ guns in the house.

Because that's the choice -- do I put myself in this sample group or not?

Think about powered trampolines -- suppose there are only five installed in the country, and on two of them a child has died this past year. That's a HORRIBLE risk, but with your method of assessment, it doesn't even show up.

If you're thinking of installing this kind of trampoline, I'd highly recommend my method of analysis over yours.

> So drowning is is roughly 2x as dangerous as guns

Drowning kills 100% of people who drown, so it's certainly more dangerous than guns.

Replace drowning with "pools" and there might be something more reasonable to compare, though hard to know what should be compared.

cf. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05...

Here are some bits from the paper:

“To date, only a single controlled exposure study of human exposure to woodsmoke itself seems to have been published (Barregard et al., 2006; Sallsten et al., 2006). Thirteen subjects were exposed to realistic concentrations of woodsmoke (200–300 μg/m3 PM2.5) generated under controlled conditions for two 4-h sessions, spaced 1 wk apart. In this study, exposure to woodsmoke resulted in small exposure-related changes in levels of inflammatory mediators and coagulation factors.”

“A questionnaire study of respiratory symptoms compared residents of 600 homes in a high woodsmoke area of Seattle, WA, with 600 homes of a low woodsmoke area. [...] When all age groups were combined, no significant differences were observed between the high- and low-exposure areas.”

“In Seattle, WA, 326 elementary school children were stud- ied during the heating seasons of 1988–1989 and 1989–1990. [...] The 26 children with asthma showed a significant decrement (18 ml/μg/m3 PM2.5) for both measures of lung function. Children without asthma showed no significant changes in lung function associ- ated with PM values.”

“In contrast, in a larger, prospective study of 904 infants in Connecticut and Virginia, Pettigrew et al. found no relation- ship between either woodstove or fireplace use and either single episodes of otitis media or recurrent otitis media, which was defined as 4 or more episodes during 1 yr (Pettigrew et al., 2004). Data on infant respiratory symptoms (in this case, a physician’s diagnosis of an ear infection) and hours of use of secondary heating sources were collected in telephone interviews with the mothers every 2 wk for 1 yr. Although both woodstove and fireplace use were significantly associated with the outcomes in bivariate models, these associations were absent in multivariate models that adjusted for gender, race, day care, number of chil- dren in the household, duration of breast-feeding, winter heating season, use of gas appliances, season of birth, maternal education, maternal history of asthma and allergy, and pets.”

And here, the most “damning” bits of summary. They’re awfully circumspect.

“Surprisingly relatively few studies examining the health impacts of woodsmoke have been conducted in developed countries, partly due to the difficulty of disentangling risks due to woodsmoke from those associated with other pollutants also present. In addition, most available studies are ecologic in design, limiting the ability to infer causality. Those that have been done, however, indicate that exposure to the smoke from residential woodburning is associated with a variety of adverse respiratory health effects, which are no different in kind and, with present knowledge, show no consistent difference in magnitude of effect from other combustion-derived ambient particles.”

“Since source apportionment studies show that woodsmoke is a major contributor to PM in many communities, it is likely that woodsmoke exposure plays a role in the spectrum of adverse effects linked to PM exposure. The large effects seen at higher exposures in the developing world provide additional evidence of the toxicity of woodsmoke.”

The paper’s conclusion includes:

“Finally, returning to the questions posed at the start, we conclude that although there is a large and growing body of evidence linking exposure to wood/biomass smoke itself with both acute and chronic illness, there is insufficient evidence at present to support regulating it separately from its individual components, especially fine particulate matter. In addition, there is insufficient evidence at present to conclude that woodsmoke particles are significantly less or more damaging to health than general ambient fine particles.”

  * * * * * * * 

"The unhappy truth about burning wood has been scientifically established to a moral certainty: That nice, cozy fire in your fireplace is bad for you. It is bad for your children. It is bad for your neighbors and their children. [...] In fact, wood smoke often contributes more harmful particulates to urban air than any other source.

"In the developing world, the burning of solid fuel in the home is a genuine scourge, second only to poor sanitation as an environmental health risk. In 2000, the World Health Organization estimated that it caused nearly 2 million premature deaths each year—considerably more than were caused by traffic accidents."

The first paragraph is hyperbolic (there are a few places in industrial countries where woodsmoke is the biggest source of pollution, but this is still pretty low by world and historical standards, and typically those areas don’t have much other air pollution to speak of, so this is unsurprising). The stuff about “moral certainty” is just crap. Maybe if you live in a place with relatively high population density and every house is mainly heated by wood, you’ll get noticeable amounts of air pollution, but this is also a different case than the author is trying to make us feel guilty about, which is having a fireplace in your living room every-once-in-a-while.

The second paragraph is much worse though, because, while accurate, is grossly misleading when included in an argument about industrialized countries without providing additional context and explanation.

  * * * * *

Anyway, people will keep burning wood in their homes, just because they like it. Most everybody knows the hazards of smoking and keep smoking anyway (including health professionals)...

I guess people banned public smoking because the smell is so ofensive to others, not because they were really worried about their health.

I probably wouldn't make the argument, but I know some well educated professionals who would.

Well installed, they burn almost everything, leaving only mineral parts of the wood. That means more energy-efficient burning, and less smoke. In addition since they're completely close all the smoke goes through the chimney, nothing gets in the house.

Correctly used, you get almost no smoke (because everything burns). The only reason a recent woodstove would produce a visible amount of smoke is if you burn stuff you're not supposed to burn (some people use their chimney/woodstove as a garbage bin) or if you burn wet wood.

So even when other energies are available, it's a pretty good way to heat your house: cheap, efficient, nice warm feeling, limited pollution.

All I got was "Damn, do I tell my open-fire loving unscientific friends they're harming their children, or should I just keep quiet for the sake of an easy life?"

People in the skeptic community tend to diminish the fact that fellow humans tend to have involuntary emotional reactions in response to arguments, no matter how good the arguments are. If someone is heavily invested in believing in something like homeopathic medicine, they will experience a strong visceral feeling when you try to discuss homeopathy in a scientific setting. Even if they don't want to, the feeling may be there.

I'm not sure what the immediate practical or ethical implications of this are. I don't believe it's right to entertain any irrational or harmful belief just because it brings someone else comfort, but I tend to be less confrontational than Sam Harris.

This, it should be mentioned, is a very wrong assumption.

The article goes on to say that "the assumption of common priors is a rather strong one and may not hold in practice", but according to Robin Hansen this is the case when Bayesians adhere to a certain pre-rationality condition: ". . . Bayesians who agree enough about the origins of their priors must have the same priors" [1].

Will Bayesians ALWAYS agree enough about the origins of their priors?

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11238-006-9004-4...

Let's look at what two people might disagree over. It is quite likely a "should" statement, rather than something simply factual. If it were cleanly factual and measurable, they could just devise a test and observe it. So it's probably a "should" statement.

A conclusion is derived from premises that logically lead to the conclusion. Those premises are in turn derived from deeper premises, and so on.

It's known that there are only three possible outcomes to such an exercise. You either delve to infinity, which is not reasonably acceptable, or you engage in circular reasoning, which is not rational, or you eventually arrive at axioms.

The axiomatic approach is the one commonly accepted. The problem is that it is pretty well-accepted that you cannot derive an "ought" statement (a "should" statement) from "is" statements alone. Any "ought" statement is going to partially rely on "ought" premises. And this means that you're eventually going to drill down to "ought" axioms.

Blowhards like Sam Harris like to argue otherwise, but really all they are doing about with their "moral science" talk is strenuously arguing that we should accept certain "ought" axioms. They couch it in language such that we should consider these axioms so basic and obvious that they somehow don't become axioms anymore, but that's silly - they are still "ought" axioms.

Anyway, the point is that we do not all have the same "ought" axioms. That's what the entire field of philosophy is all about - the different collections of "ought" axioms we accept for ourselves.

And since two people can have different "ought" axioms, it is then possible for them to have entire world views that conflict with others, and yet are still internally consistent.

In other words, it's possible for two people to come to two different conclusions while still both being perfectly and completely logical, rational, and internally consistent.

This thing about different "ought" axioms might be what the theorem means about "different priors", but if so, that would basically make the theorem meaningless - and it seems to be a different meaning than what "common knowledge" implies.

It has seemed to me historically that Sam Harris' grasp on what "religious" people are like is . . . tenuous. I guess that isn't really surprising, given that he isn't one, but people seem to inexplicably consider him a credible source anyway.

Programmers and engineers are not a bastion of rationality, no matter how much we like to think we are.

The tragedy of the commons is a thing & communal regulation is the response that works. I can't think of anything that fits the definition of 'a commons' better than the air that you and I breathe.

Note that it's still possible to burn 'smokeless' fuels, including some forms of treated wood IIRC, very high quality coal & it's perfectly ok to burn wood in a high-temperature wood burning stove, which are much cleaner than an open fire.

The gory details are here: http://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/

Apparently my colleagues all know this — everyone just knows that it's OK to burn smokeless coal (anthracite) but not wood.

"we conclude that although there is a large and growing body of evidence linking exposure to wood/biomass smoke itself with both acute and chronic illness, there is insufficient evidence at present to support regulating it separately from its individual components, especially fine particulate matter.

In addition, there is insufficient evidence at present to conclude that woodsmoke particles are significantly less or more damaging to health than general ambient fine particles."

That's a good lesson about science: just because an article has serious references doesn't mean it's not bullshit. Don't take the facts for granted if you don't actually read the references.

Conclusion could be as well "stop arguing with religious people, you're wrong too" as "don't push their feeling too hard and have some compassion when explaining your arguments" :)

I do feel that my personal liberty is under attack when people like Sam Harris are out there, advocating that my life be regulated into a sterile, one size fits all dystopian nightmare of his own design.

Incidentally people should stop being lazy and say carbon dioxide when they mean carbon dioxide - otherwise it gets confusing in situations like this where fireplaces release both carbon dioxide, and carbon, into the air.