13 ms·

If you want to feel some dissonance about this, you might note that this is the exact language the CDC uses for things like secondhand smoke -- "There is no ris

If you want to feel some dissonance about this, you might note that this is the exact language the CDC uses for things like secondhand smoke -- "There is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke" -- which everybody nods along to and accepts without much scrutiny. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/secondhand_smoke/health_effects/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco... Meanwhile, when it's something like, say, cosmic radiation exposure from commercial air travel, suddenly the CDC is very interested in levels of exposure and has language that provides context intended to downplay the risks. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/air_travel.html https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/air_travel.html Why these statements bother us when they're about one thing and not another -- or, indeed, why our health agencies would choose language like this for some kinds of risks and not others -- is left as an exercise for the reader.

ethanbond 5y ago
This would be a very meaningful comparison if people were regularly forcing a diner-full of people to hop on a plane with them several times per year.
- dionidium 5y ago
  Obviously the analogy to getting on the plane is walking in the diner.
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    I think we can all agree there are stronger arguments for air travel than habitual smoking of cigarettes.
- slingnow 5y ago
  Do you live somewhere that forces you inside of diners several times per year? I'm interested in where that is.
mattmaroon 5y ago
The CDC has been unfortunately hopelessly politicized. It happened long before the pandemic. OTOH, I would make the differentiating point that air travel has positive benefits to society and costs and one has to weigh those against each other. You can’t make the blanket statement “earth would be better off if air travel went away completely.” It’s hard to find any benefit to smoking, first hand or second, so it’s easy enough to just shit on it. The ROI on whatever ills aviation may have is a topic of discussion, there’s 0 ROI on smoking.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago
  >> It's hard to find any benefit to smoking... Ritualistically, as an exercise in getting out of one's 'normal' consciousness, it can present useful information for self study. In habitual form, it is of course very destructive.
  - groby_b 5y ago
    So the "getting out of consciousness" that is the relaxation experience many "habitual" smokers have is worthless, while changing your state for ritualistic purposes is helpful? Both are very tiny self-reported effects that are close to non-observable for outsiders. Why would one outweigh the other, if you allow self-reported epsilon effects at all?
    - artificialLimbs 5y ago
      >> getting out of consciousness You mean sleep (as in, night time bed activity)? I'm not talking about sleep. I am discussing getting out of normative modes of being but not going to sleep. >> that is the relaxation experience This is not the only experience resulting from tobacco use. There are more subtle effects as well. >> worthless I haven't declared a value judgment against the habit. I am saying it is destructive to the body. Do you believe that to not be a fact? >> helpful Again, I'm not presenting value judgments here. I am saying it can present useful information. It sounds to me like you have taken offense somewhere for some reason. I am not putting weight on one or the other. *edit: clarity
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
While I somewhat agree with your overall point, level of control is important here. I can choose whether to get on a plane or take a drink. I can't control if someone farts standing next to me, or if they exhale smoke in my face.
ABeeSea 5y ago
Did you look at any of the references at the bottom of the page? There are many, many dozens of studies in the report by the surgeon general. On page 421 when they analyze lung cancer risk, they have studies with volume and frequency of second hand smoke based on the volume and frequency of the smoking habits of the one spouse being a smoker and the other being a non smoker.
temporalparts 5y ago
Have you actually done research differentiating between the risks of tobacco exposure and radiation exposure? There's no scientific evidence to suggest that small doses of radiation (< 0.1 mSv) is harmful to you, at all. In fact, there's even scientific evidence to suggest the opposite, it's called radiation hormesis.
kaba0 5y ago
I can choose to take a flight or consume alcohol, but I can’t choose to not breathe while you smoke next to me. There is no need to look for conspiracy theories as homework.
- slingnow 5y ago
  In case you missed it, the claim has nothing to do with choice -- it has to do with making a blanket, absolute statement for one thing and a more nuanced statement for another. I guess you're exactly the person these types of statements were meant to placate.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    As a public statement, mathematical existence of risk may, if small enough, can very well be said to be non-existing. For all practical purposes, is a 1e-10 risk contain any sort of information for the average people? Is it lying to call it risk-free? I really don’t think so, human language is not exact - in the real world nothing would be risk-free otherwise, essentially we would loose that word.
spacemark 5y ago
Good points. If I can take a crack at the exercise for the reader, I think the inconsistency has fairly straight forward reasons, even if they're frustrating: humans are terrible at reasoned risk analysis (if they even see the value); people prefer absolutes and easy heuristics to "it depends"; most people have first-hand experience with the extremes of smoking and drinking and it's thus easy to vilify; the best defense of vice is pleasure, which isn't much of a defense in the eyes of many, whereas exposure to pollution and cosmic rays is impossible to prevent without giving up near-universally valued things (transportation, energy). We see similar patterns with nuclear power, climate change, and pandemics...
babypuncher 5y ago
I think the difference is that there is something to be gained in exchange for the risk posed by cosmic rays during air travel, so people are more interested in taking a nuanced approach to it. Meanwhile second hand smoke is a nuisance at best and a legitimate health concern at worse. Most people (myself included) are happy to ban smoking on airplanes or in restaurants even if the health benefits are negligible at best. I do agree though, studies like this should always include useful context rather than just making absolutist statements. Perhaps alcohol and tobacco smoke need something similar to the banana equivalent dose used when talking about radiation exposure.
- dleslie 5y ago
  > Nobody gains anything from an activity that fundamentally requires exposure to tobacco smoke. Except smokers, of course. Smoking isn't just addictive and deadly, like alcohol, it has its own appeal to users.
  - thrashh 5y ago
    We’re not talking smoking though We’re talking second hand smoke Who exactly is looking to get some second hand smoke in their face while avoiding actually smoking?
    - jimmaswell 5y ago
      I seem to be in a small minority, but I always liked the smell of second hand smoke despite never smoking. I've smelled some cigarettes up close and I think I'd really like them, but I don't want to start for health reasons.
      - sneak 5y ago
        The difference is that you consent to someone else's drugs entering your body.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        Me too. I liked the smell. And the bars used to be less 'clear' due to the smoke. They had more atmosphere. I did hate the way my clothes smelled afterwards but anyway that's what a washing machine is for.
scoofy 5y ago
If you want to feel some dissonance about this dissonance, you might note that a meta-analysis was done on the evidence that using a parachute is effective at saving your life when jumping from an aircraft. It's a real, but satirical approach to worshiping randomized controlled trials for things that should effectively be obvious. There are obvious limits to empiricism, and we shouldn't proudly flaunt lack of evidence ≠ evidence of absence in cases where it's perfectly reasonable to expect results. I mean, we could be wrong about theses things, but it would be a shift in thinking akin to newtonian -> einsteinian physics. Paper: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial Conclusions: Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice. >https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094 https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
- Mathnerd314 5y ago
  As the paper's title says, it's a randomized controlled trial, not a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis would likely exclude the RCT due to poor experimental design.
  - scoofy 5y ago
    You are correct, but a meta-analysis would still suggest that there is no evidence that parachutes protect people jumping out of airplanes, because we don’t have evidence because we can’t have evidence.
    - Mathnerd314 5y ago
      Actually meta-analyses are not limited to RCTs - in my experience they can be quite subjective. So for example, a meta-analysis might say that there's a fair amount of evidence that people not wearing parachutes die after falling from airplanes (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/26/story-an-afghan-man-who-fell-sky/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/26/story-an-afg...), and plenty of evidence that people can land successfully with a parachute (skydiving videos, too many to count). The conclusion would be a strong correlation between parachute use and not dying. The only thing there isn't is an RCT, to prove that the correlation is causal. The purpose of the parachute RCT paper seems to be to prove that the design of an RCT is just as fallible as any other reasoning that attempts to prove causality, so in fact RCTs are not the "gold standard" and other forms of reasoning may be just as valid. (e.g. basic physics in the case of the parachute)
ineedasername 5y ago
I think the reason one bothers us and another doesn't (in the case off smoking) relates to the level of non-contradiction evidence. It's been decades since the pseudo-research propaganda from the tobacco industry was taken seriously, and lots of legitimate research to go along with that. Alcohol on the other hand seems to produce a fair number of contradictory studies on a regular basis. There are pretty clear negative effects of excessive use, but at the low-to-moderate levels it's a lot murkier. It's especially hard to know from some studies whether or not the proposed negative impact was caused by alcohol or whether alcohol use was a type of proxy variable for general health and lifestyle.
- notahacker 5y ago
  It seems the reason they've gone for the "no amount of alcohol is good for" precisely because of the existence and popular influence of contradictory claims. They're taking the position that it's the negative effects that have the plausible mechanisms and the associations of low-to-moderate use with sometimes better outcomes than abstinent cohorts that are most likely proxy variables for general health and [former] lifestyle. (c.f. absolutely no pop-science reporting on supposed therapeutic benefits of cosmic radiation from frequent flying, so the average person hearing about it is likely to overestimate its negative effects rather than wonder if they should be booking a flight with every meal!)
dahart 5y ago
There is no dissonance here, this is FUD. The language is wildly different because the actual risks are wildly different. One kills a lot of people and the other doesn’t. How many people are actually dying from air travel radiation? The numbers are low enough that they’re hard to find evidence for. Here’s a study, for example, that attempted to answer the question for pilots, who obviously fly frequently. They weren’t even able to detect higher death rates at all. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14648170/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14648170/ “Neither external and internal comparisons nor nested case-control analyses showed any substantially increased risks for cancer mortality due to ionizing radiation.” (Edit: of course there are some studies that demonstrate small amounts of increased cancer risk, and increased risk of pregnancy complications for airline crews. The numbers are small.) On the other hand, “Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States” https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal... Even if you are skeptical of the CDC’s estimates for mortality rates by things like second hand smoke, there are pretty clear reasons to take smoking a lot more seriously as a risk than radiation exposure from air travel, the direct risk to smokers is orders of magnitude higher than the risk of air travel radiation. The fact that the CDC’s language reflects the actual risks is a good reason to put more trust in what they say, not less. They’re not trying to hide something from you, they’re trying to help you understand the actual relative differences in risk, which are much, much higher for smoking. Edit2: BTW, the WHO agrees with the CDC about there being no safe levels of smoke, and is backed by significant amounts of research and outcome statistics worldwide. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(outdoor)-air-quality-and-health https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(ou...
- dionidium 5y ago
  First of all, this is a good and fair pushback. But I’d respond that I chose secondhand smoke for a reason. I similarly doubt there’s any measurable impact of being around a smoker every once in a while, but the language around secondhand smoke got more and more hysterical leading up to the widespread implementation of smoking bans, to the point that it’s not uncommon today to hear people complain that walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside is a risk to their health. That’s basically absurd. But the “no safe level of exposure” language has been used to justify such claims. Finally, to be clear, even if you think this language is good and useful, there’s still utility in thinking about why that’s true, especially if hearing similar language about alcohol bothers you for some reason.
Xixi 5y ago
Just speculating here, but doesn't it have something to do with accumulation in the body? Your body obviously can't accumulate radiations. It also does process and eliminate the like of ethanol and many other substances. That's not the case, I believe, for heavy metals like mercury, lead or arsenic, that are eliminated much more slowly (if at all?). That's why you can enjoy lychees by eating a few everyday if you fancy it, and will only poison yourself if you eat a lot at once. But you can poison someone by exposing them to a little bit of arsenic everyday (at least in the movies, not sure how true it is...) I think tar from smoke accumulates, and there is a lot of it in second-hand smoke. Obviously not a doctor, so I'm probably completely wrong...
- robocat 5y ago
  The damage from smoking is accumulative. I have noticed it in the skin of young female smokers after a few years of heavy smoking. You can see it's affects on some other parts of the body over longer periods. Drinking a lot of alcohol has a similar effects as tobacco on your health, and on the skin. If you know a heavy drinker then they quit for six months and then you see their face, there is noticeable rejuvenation. There are patterns of looks to older people that drink at pubs frequently.
- spider-mario 5y ago
  You might enjoy this excerpt from E. T. Jaynes’ book “Probability Theory: The Logic of Science”: https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf#page=16 https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf#page=16 (the section that starts with “What is ‘safe’?”)
justatdotin 5y ago
yes but these three (radiation, smoke, alcohol) are very different hazards with quite different modes of harm
ausername42027 5y ago
There is robust data that the risk of first-hand smoke is not a linear relationship between cancer (and other bad stuff) and dose--no amount of smoking is safe. To be frank you are uninformed on basic statistics as well as medicine. You are doing the standard thing that many educated people do when they think they are smarter and more informed than they are. You dress up a bad take as if you found some secret (CDC's hypocritical language) and assume that a mathematical relationship exists ("obviously exposure to bad stuff carries linear risk"), when it is actually more complex than that (if we can call a binary relationship more complex than linear lol).
- lixtra 5y ago
  > bad stuff carries linear risk This is a straw man. I believe that a lot of stuff carries continuous risk going up from zero and increasing with dosage. If a substance does not start with zero risk at zero dose, it is most likely not a toxin but an essential (i.e. vitamin A). Very few substances are so rare that the discreteness might matter for practical purposes. To portray the risk as binary, centered at zero is certainly wrong. You also would have a very hard time to find study subjects who have never been exposed to a few particles of smoke.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jliptzin 5y ago
  That doesn’t mean it’s not linear to some degree; surely 24 cigarettes a day is worse than 1 a week.
quantgenius 5y ago
Smoking by a person may or may not create benefits for the person smoking. However, secondhand smoke creates no positives and significant net negatives (the smell, the accumulation of black deposits on clothes of things around you) for anyone who encounters it even if you ignore the health effects. It can also create pretty serious immediate issues beyond just the long term problems for people with breathing issues like asthma or certain allergies. If smoking and second hand smoke were everywhere, like it was in 80s and early 90s in the US, and you were one of the fairly large percentage of the population with these issues, you basically couldn't go anywhere without risking your health. If the second hand inhaler were a child, it's an even more serious problem. Nicotine is highly addictive and does a real number on your brain. It makes addicted smokers justify things to themselves due to the sheer physical need and you end up with parents smoking around young kids etc. Even if you are a libertarian, you should support restrictions on smoking consistent with the principle that each of us has freedom but your freedom to swing your fist only extends as far as my nose. Alcohol is a bit different. Unless the drinker starts behaving badly after drinking, or there are long term issues like alcoholism that affect the whole family, they are really only hurting themselves.

ethanbond 5y ago

This would be a very meaningful comparison if people were regularly forcing a diner-full of people to hop on a plane with them several times per year.

dionidium 5y ago
Obviously the analogy to getting on the plane is walking in the diner.
- Forgeties79 5y ago
  I think we can all agree there are stronger arguments for air travel than habitual smoking of cigarettes.
slingnow 5y ago
Do you live somewhere that forces you inside of diners several times per year? I'm interested in where that is.

mattmaroon 5y ago

The CDC has been unfortunately hopelessly politicized. It happened long before the pandemic. OTOH, I would make the differentiating point that air travel has positive benefits to society and costs and one has to weigh those against each other. You can’t make the blanket statement “earth would be better off if air travel went away completely.” It’s hard to find any benefit to smoking, first hand or second, so it’s easy enough to just shit on it. The ROI on whatever ills aviation may have is a topic of discussion, there’s 0 ROI on smoking.

artificialLimbs 5y ago
>> It's hard to find any benefit to smoking... Ritualistically, as an exercise in getting out of one's 'normal' consciousness, it can present useful information for self study. In habitual form, it is of course very destructive.
- groby_b 5y ago
  So the "getting out of consciousness" that is the relaxation experience many "habitual" smokers have is worthless, while changing your state for ritualistic purposes is helpful? Both are very tiny self-reported effects that are close to non-observable for outsiders. Why would one outweigh the other, if you allow self-reported epsilon effects at all?
  - artificialLimbs 5y ago
    >> getting out of consciousness You mean sleep (as in, night time bed activity)? I'm not talking about sleep. I am discussing getting out of normative modes of being but not going to sleep. >> that is the relaxation experience This is not the only experience resulting from tobacco use. There are more subtle effects as well. >> worthless I haven't declared a value judgment against the habit. I am saying it is destructive to the body. Do you believe that to not be a fact? >> helpful Again, I'm not presenting value judgments here. I am saying it can present useful information. It sounds to me like you have taken offense somewhere for some reason. I am not putting weight on one or the other. *edit: clarity

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

While I somewhat agree with your overall point, level of control is important here. I can choose whether to get on a plane or take a drink. I can't control if someone farts standing next to me, or if they exhale smoke in my face.

ABeeSea 5y ago

Did you look at any of the references at the bottom of the page? There are many, many dozens of studies in the report by the surgeon general. On page 421 when they analyze lung cancer risk, they have studies with volume and frequency of second hand smoke based on the volume and frequency of the smoking habits of the one spouse being a smoker and the other being a non smoker.

temporalparts 5y ago

Have you actually done research differentiating between the risks of tobacco exposure and radiation exposure? There's no scientific evidence to suggest that small doses of radiation (< 0.1 mSv) is harmful to you, at all. In fact, there's even scientific evidence to suggest the opposite, it's called radiation hormesis.

kaba0 5y ago

I can choose to take a flight or consume alcohol, but I can’t choose to not breathe while you smoke next to me. There is no need to look for conspiracy theories as homework.

slingnow 5y ago
In case you missed it, the claim has nothing to do with choice -- it has to do with making a blanket, absolute statement for one thing and a more nuanced statement for another. I guess you're exactly the person these types of statements were meant to placate.
- kaba0 5y ago
  As a public statement, mathematical existence of risk may, if small enough, can very well be said to be non-existing. For all practical purposes, is a 1e-10 risk contain any sort of information for the average people? Is it lying to call it risk-free? I really don’t think so, human language is not exact - in the real world nothing would be risk-free otherwise, essentially we would loose that word.

spacemark 5y ago

Good points. If I can take a crack at the exercise for the reader, I think the inconsistency has fairly straight forward reasons, even if they're frustrating: humans are terrible at reasoned risk analysis (if they even see the value); people prefer absolutes and easy heuristics to "it depends"; most people have first-hand experience with the extremes of smoking and drinking and it's thus easy to vilify; the best defense of vice is pleasure, which isn't much of a defense in the eyes of many, whereas exposure to pollution and cosmic rays is impossible to prevent without giving up near-universally valued things (transportation, energy). We see similar patterns with nuclear power, climate change, and pandemics...

babypuncher 5y ago

I think the difference is that there is something to be gained in exchange for the risk posed by cosmic rays during air travel, so people are more interested in taking a nuanced approach to it. Meanwhile second hand smoke is a nuisance at best and a legitimate health concern at worse. Most people (myself included) are happy to ban smoking on airplanes or in restaurants even if the health benefits are negligible at best. I do agree though, studies like this should always include useful context rather than just making absolutist statements. Perhaps alcohol and tobacco smoke need something similar to the banana equivalent dose used when talking about radiation exposure.

dleslie 5y ago
> Nobody gains anything from an activity that fundamentally requires exposure to tobacco smoke. Except smokers, of course. Smoking isn't just addictive and deadly, like alcohol, it has its own appeal to users.
- thrashh 5y ago
  We’re not talking smoking though We’re talking second hand smoke Who exactly is looking to get some second hand smoke in their face while avoiding actually smoking?
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    I seem to be in a small minority, but I always liked the smell of second hand smoke despite never smoking. I've smelled some cigarettes up close and I think I'd really like them, but I don't want to start for health reasons.
    - sneak 5y ago
      The difference is that you consent to someone else's drugs entering your body.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Me too. I liked the smell. And the bars used to be less 'clear' due to the smoke. They had more atmosphere. I did hate the way my clothes smelled afterwards but anyway that's what a washing machine is for.

scoofy 5y ago

If you want to feel some dissonance about this dissonance, you might note that a meta-analysis was done on the evidence that using a parachute is effective at saving your life when jumping from an aircraft. It's a real, but satirical approach to worshiping randomized controlled trials for things that should effectively be obvious. There are obvious limits to empiricism, and we shouldn't proudly flaunt lack of evidence ≠ evidence of absence in cases where it's perfectly reasonable to expect results. I mean, we could be wrong about theses things, but it would be a shift in thinking akin to newtonian -> einsteinian physics. Paper: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial Conclusions: Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice. >https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094 https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

Mathnerd314 5y ago
As the paper's title says, it's a randomized controlled trial, not a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis would likely exclude the RCT due to poor experimental design.
- scoofy 5y ago
  You are correct, but a meta-analysis would still suggest that there is no evidence that parachutes protect people jumping out of airplanes, because we don’t have evidence because we can’t have evidence.
  - Mathnerd314 5y ago
    Actually meta-analyses are not limited to RCTs - in my experience they can be quite subjective. So for example, a meta-analysis might say that there's a fair amount of evidence that people not wearing parachutes die after falling from airplanes (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/26/story-an-afghan-man-who-fell-sky/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/26/story-an-afg...), and plenty of evidence that people can land successfully with a parachute (skydiving videos, too many to count). The conclusion would be a strong correlation between parachute use and not dying. The only thing there isn't is an RCT, to prove that the correlation is causal. The purpose of the parachute RCT paper seems to be to prove that the design of an RCT is just as fallible as any other reasoning that attempts to prove causality, so in fact RCTs are not the "gold standard" and other forms of reasoning may be just as valid. (e.g. basic physics in the case of the parachute)

ineedasername 5y ago

I think the reason one bothers us and another doesn't (in the case off smoking) relates to the level of non-contradiction evidence. It's been decades since the pseudo-research propaganda from the tobacco industry was taken seriously, and lots of legitimate research to go along with that. Alcohol on the other hand seems to produce a fair number of contradictory studies on a regular basis. There are pretty clear negative effects of excessive use, but at the low-to-moderate levels it's a lot murkier. It's especially hard to know from some studies whether or not the proposed negative impact was caused by alcohol or whether alcohol use was a type of proxy variable for general health and lifestyle.

notahacker 5y ago
It seems the reason they've gone for the "no amount of alcohol is good for" precisely because of the existence and popular influence of contradictory claims. They're taking the position that it's the negative effects that have the plausible mechanisms and the associations of low-to-moderate use with sometimes better outcomes than abstinent cohorts that are most likely proxy variables for general health and [former] lifestyle. (c.f. absolutely no pop-science reporting on supposed therapeutic benefits of cosmic radiation from frequent flying, so the average person hearing about it is likely to overestimate its negative effects rather than wonder if they should be booking a flight with every meal!)

dahart 5y ago

There is no dissonance here, this is FUD. The language is wildly different because the actual risks are wildly different. One kills a lot of people and the other doesn’t. How many people are actually dying from air travel radiation? The numbers are low enough that they’re hard to find evidence for. Here’s a study, for example, that attempted to answer the question for pilots, who obviously fly frequently. They weren’t even able to detect higher death rates at all. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14648170/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14648170/ “Neither external and internal comparisons nor nested case-control analyses showed any substantially increased risks for cancer mortality due to ionizing radiation.” (Edit: of course there are some studies that demonstrate small amounts of increased cancer risk, and increased risk of pregnancy complications for airline crews. The numbers are small.) On the other hand, “Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States” https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal... Even if you are skeptical of the CDC’s estimates for mortality rates by things like second hand smoke, there are pretty clear reasons to take smoking a lot more seriously as a risk than radiation exposure from air travel, the direct risk to smokers is orders of magnitude higher than the risk of air travel radiation. The fact that the CDC’s language reflects the actual risks is a good reason to put more trust in what they say, not less. They’re not trying to hide something from you, they’re trying to help you understand the actual relative differences in risk, which are much, much higher for smoking. Edit2: BTW, the WHO agrees with the CDC about there being no safe levels of smoke, and is backed by significant amounts of research and outcome statistics worldwide. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(outdoor)-air-quality-and-health https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(ou...

dionidium 5y ago
First of all, this is a good and fair pushback. But I’d respond that I chose secondhand smoke for a reason. I similarly doubt there’s any measurable impact of being around a smoker every once in a while, but the language around secondhand smoke got more and more hysterical leading up to the widespread implementation of smoking bans, to the point that it’s not uncommon today to hear people complain that walking near a smoker on a sidewalk outside is a risk to their health. That’s basically absurd. But the “no safe level of exposure” language has been used to justify such claims. Finally, to be clear, even if you think this language is good and useful, there’s still utility in thinking about why that’s true, especially if hearing similar language about alcohol bothers you for some reason.

Xixi 5y ago

Just speculating here, but doesn't it have something to do with accumulation in the body? Your body obviously can't accumulate radiations. It also does process and eliminate the like of ethanol and many other substances. That's not the case, I believe, for heavy metals like mercury, lead or arsenic, that are eliminated much more slowly (if at all?). That's why you can enjoy lychees by eating a few everyday if you fancy it, and will only poison yourself if you eat a lot at once. But you can poison someone by exposing them to a little bit of arsenic everyday (at least in the movies, not sure how true it is...) I think tar from smoke accumulates, and there is a lot of it in second-hand smoke. Obviously not a doctor, so I'm probably completely wrong...

robocat 5y ago
The damage from smoking is accumulative. I have noticed it in the skin of young female smokers after a few years of heavy smoking. You can see it's affects on some other parts of the body over longer periods. Drinking a lot of alcohol has a similar effects as tobacco on your health, and on the skin. If you know a heavy drinker then they quit for six months and then you see their face, there is noticeable rejuvenation. There are patterns of looks to older people that drink at pubs frequently.
spider-mario 5y ago
You might enjoy this excerpt from E. T. Jaynes’ book “Probability Theory: The Logic of Science”: https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf#page=16 https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf#page=16 (the section that starts with “What is ‘safe’?”)

justatdotin 5y ago

yes but these three (radiation, smoke, alcohol) are very different hazards with quite different modes of harm

ausername42027 5y ago

There is robust data that the risk of first-hand smoke is not a linear relationship between cancer (and other bad stuff) and dose--no amount of smoking is safe. To be frank you are uninformed on basic statistics as well as medicine. You are doing the standard thing that many educated people do when they think they are smarter and more informed than they are. You dress up a bad take as if you found some secret (CDC's hypocritical language) and assume that a mathematical relationship exists ("obviously exposure to bad stuff carries linear risk"), when it is actually more complex than that (if we can call a binary relationship more complex than linear lol).

lixtra 5y ago
> bad stuff carries linear risk This is a straw man. I believe that a lot of stuff carries continuous risk going up from zero and increasing with dosage. If a substance does not start with zero risk at zero dose, it is most likely not a toxin but an essential (i.e. vitamin A). Very few substances are so rare that the discreteness might matter for practical purposes. To portray the risk as binary, centered at zero is certainly wrong. You also would have a very hard time to find study subjects who have never been exposed to a few particles of smoke.
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jliptzin 5y ago
That doesn’t mean it’s not linear to some degree; surely 24 cigarettes a day is worse than 1 a week.

quantgenius 5y ago

Smoking by a person may or may not create benefits for the person smoking. However, secondhand smoke creates no positives and significant net negatives (the smell, the accumulation of black deposits on clothes of things around you) for anyone who encounters it even if you ignore the health effects. It can also create pretty serious immediate issues beyond just the long term problems for people with breathing issues like asthma or certain allergies. If smoking and second hand smoke were everywhere, like it was in 80s and early 90s in the US, and you were one of the fairly large percentage of the population with these issues, you basically couldn't go anywhere without risking your health. If the second hand inhaler were a child, it's an even more serious problem. Nicotine is highly addictive and does a real number on your brain. It makes addicted smokers justify things to themselves due to the sheer physical need and you end up with parents smoking around young kids etc. Even if you are a libertarian, you should support restrictions on smoking consistent with the principle that each of us has freedom but your freedom to swing your fist only extends as far as my nose. Alcohol is a bit different. Unless the drinker starts behaving badly after drinking, or there are long term issues like alcoholism that affect the whole family, they are really only hurting themselves.