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The implication is "cycling to work => lower cancer and heart disease rate". You can't deduce "not cycling to work increases cancer and heart disease" from that
by revelation 10y ago
The implication is "cycling to work => lower cancer and heart disease rate". You can't deduce "not cycling to work increases cancer and heart disease" from that, and that makes practical sense if you consider that the actual underlying factor is exercise.
- ebfd 10y agoYou shifted units by dropping the word "rate" in the second formulation. "Not cycling to work increases cancer and heart disease rate" is true.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoThe two statements are equivalent - it's just framing between "Exercising is good" and "Not exercising is bad". Oppositely, you could say equally that "smoking causes lung cancer" or that "Not smoking reduces the risk of lung cancer". But mandated warning labels read the former, because "smoking causes cancer" assumes that the default state of a person is to be not smoking, and that smoking is a choice they make. To someone who habitually smokes in a culture of smokers, this is a different way of thinking. It's an unusual state for people to be so sedentary. We sleep in a bed, sit in a car and drive to work, sit at a desk in an office, sit in the car again, go home and lay on the couch and watch TV or browse the Internet, and repeat. To not get exercise is weird. And yes, to these people, they should be informed that exercising is good for them. But this message, conveyed instead as "not exercising is bad", implies that not exercising should be considered abnormal behavior and that daily exercise is the default.