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The change from when I was a kid has been enormous. It used to be that there were places that were basically just a cloud. You open the door, there's a cloud in

The change from when I was a kid has been enormous. It used to be that there were places that were basically just a cloud. You open the door, there's a cloud inside with people sitting in it, chatting, eating, whatever. I remember getting sent by my dad to buy his cigs, and I'd try to hold my breath on my way to the counter. Nowadays, I hardly see any smokers. They still have them outside night spots, but it's not many. I only caught the tail end of it, but it used to be all over the place, every single kind of establishment had to accommodate smoking in some way. On this issue, it's worth looking up the statistic epistemology around how we discovered that smoking is bad for you. At the time a very famous statistician (Fischer?) maintained that we couldn't actually tell whether it was causal or not. In the end the evidence from various studies ruled out various competing hypotheses, for instance that people who are going to get cancer will somehow be more prone to smoke. IIRC they found a dataset of doctors and found the ones who smoked tended to die of cancer more often than those who didn't.

soco 4y ago
20 years ago I'd come out of my favorite club and could rub mud from my face. Good times (the age, not the mud).
dxbydt 4y ago
>At the time a very famous statistician (Fischer?) maintained that we couldn't actually tell whether it was causal or not. It was Fisher, here's a fantastic summary of the whole episode: https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics-didnt-believe/ https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics... My statistics professor showed us gruesome pictures of what was done in the 70s due to lack of conclusive evidence that smoking causes cancer. They forced dogs to smoke. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/may/20/thepeople-investigative-journalism https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/may/20/the... Then monkeys. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6782600/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6782600/ Now that we have conclusive evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, have we stopped ? Here's a zoo in China that forces a baby monkey to smoke in an apparent attempt to dissuade future smokers. https://metro.co.uk/2021/11/05/china-baby-monkey-forced-to-smoke-for-zoo-public-health-campaign-15552034/ https://metro.co.uk/2021/11/05/china-baby-monkey-forced-to-s...

soco 4y ago

20 years ago I'd come out of my favorite club and could rub mud from my face. Good times (the age, not the mud).

dxbydt 4y ago

>At the time a very famous statistician (Fischer?) maintained that we couldn't actually tell whether it was causal or not. It was Fisher, here's a fantastic summary of the whole episode: https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics-didnt-believe/ https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics... My statistics professor showed us gruesome pictures of what was done in the 70s due to lack of conclusive evidence that smoking causes cancer. They forced dogs to smoke. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/may/20/thepeople-investigative-journalism https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/may/20/the... Then monkeys. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6782600/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6782600/ Now that we have conclusive evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, have we stopped ? Here's a zoo in China that forces a baby monkey to smoke in an apparent attempt to dissuade future smokers. https://metro.co.uk/2021/11/05/china-baby-monkey-forced-to-smoke-for-zoo-public-health-campaign-15552034/ https://metro.co.uk/2021/11/05/china-baby-monkey-forced-to-s...