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> Any effect that’s dwarfed by cars might as well be nothing, there’s no sense worrying about a splinter in a broken leg. Now we’re conflating several differen

• lmm 5y ago
  > Now we’re conflating several different things. The overall contribution to AQI metrics might be dwarfed by cars, but the overall mortality is not - estimated rates of mortality from smoking related causes is higher than the estimated rates of mortality from pollution. But "smoking related causes" is conflating two very different things. If you want to ban smoking because it's harmful to smokers, that's a very different argument from banning smoking because it's harmful to others. It would be very convenient for people who want (out of what is - to them - legitimate concern, but is coming from a very different cultural background to that of most smokers) to ban smoking if secondhand smoking were clearly harmful, but frankly if this kind of paper is the best they have then I strongly suspect that it actually isn't. > If you want to pick apart the methodology, it’d be better to find a different primary source that empirically demonstrates that proximal secondhand smoke is not harmful. It's hard to publish a negative result and hard to get funding for work that goes against the narrative. And fundamentally the onus is on the people claiming an effect to demonstrate that it's real. > The point I was making is that secondhand smoke can and does affect people outdoors even if it doesn’t push the AQI, and the reason is proximity - smokers are on average hanging around much closer to non-smokers than cars are. Again that's something that I think would need to be scientifically shown rather than just assumed.
  • dahart 5y ago
    To be clear, secondhand smoke has absolutely been scientifically proven to kill people. We’ve been discussing the margins of outdoor secondhand smoke, which is, I admit, harder to demonstrate conclusively with simple stats. Outdoor conditions vary wildly, and proximity certainly matters. I agree that it’s hard to publish a negative result, but the fact is that I gave you a primary research source that was trivial to find and claims to show only a moderate effect, and you’re still rationalizing your discounting of it and rationalizing why you don’t have any primary sources to support the view that outdoor secondhand smoke isn’t harmful. It would be silly to claim that secondhand smoke is not harmful outdoors, because we already know for a fact that exposure to secondhand smoke is harmful, and being outdoors just reduces the exposure depending on conditions - wind, dissipation, distance, partial enclosure, etc. There’s no question about whether it’s harmful, the only question is how much. People aren’t banning smoking because it’s sometimes risky. People are banning smoking because it’s always risky, and non-smokers don’t always have control over their exposure levels. The outdoor exposure levels might be considerably lower than indoor exposure, but why should you tolerate any exposure at all? If you can smell it, you’re breathing additional pollution and toxins. You haven’t given any reasons at all that we should accept and tolerate lower-than-indoor levels of risk and damage just because they’re lower. Some people prefer none, and isn’t that a right they should have in public places? Why should people even tolerate the smell if they don’t like it? Would you tolerate a small amount of tastable but moderately low risk poop from your neighbors in your drinking water, given a choice?
    • lmm 5y ago
      > To be clear, secondhand smoke has absolutely been scientifically proven to kill people. News to me. If that's true, why do conversations about secondhand smoke involve so much rhetoric and so little science? > People aren’t banning smoking because it’s sometimes risky. People are banning smoking because it’s always risky, and non-smokers don’t always have control over their exposure levels. The outdoor exposure levels might be considerably lower than indoor exposure, but why should you tolerate any exposure at all? If you can smell it, you’re breathing additional pollution and toxins. You haven’t given any reasons at all that we should accept and tolerate lower-than-indoor levels of risk and damage just because they’re lower. Some people prefer none, and isn’t that a right they should have in public places? If they should have that kind of right, they should have that right in respect to other sources of air pollution like cars or wood fires too. If it's about risk, we should set a safe level and ban the biggest contributors to it. If it's about cost/benefit, we should do an honest assessment of how much benefit is required to justify how much pollution, and set a corresponding tax level on all sources of air pollution, or a cost/benefit level for which kind of sources we'll allow and which we'll ban. Maybe the missing reason here is that we're quietly putting a higher value on the pleasures of cars (i.e. of upper/middle class people) than the pleasures of smoking (i.e. of lower-class people)? > Would you tolerate a small amount of tastable but moderately low risk poop from your neighbors in your drinking water, given a choice? I think the fact that you go for a disgust-based argument is pretty telling: this isn't about the health risks of secondhand smoke, it's about a cultural disgust of smoking and smokers. I hate smoking and smokers as much as anyone, but this thread has really made me think about public officials' eagerness to ban it.