3 ms·

I think a large contributor is poor indoor air quality - of all types, not just one specific pollutant - causing inflammation and thus cancer. Homes have gotten

I think a large contributor is poor indoor air quality - of all types, not just one specific pollutant - causing inflammation and thus cancer. Homes have gotten far tighter in recent years, and people buy ever more cheap furniture and inexpensive consumer products. So you have formaldehyde and other VOCs off-gassing, you have plasticizer vapors, nanoplastics in the air from synthetic furniture and cloth, you have refrigerants leaking from appliances and from insulation foam… I don’t think nearly anyone understands just how many unique poorly-studied chemicals are emitted into your indoor air by your average set of household products. That’s all to say nothing of common and better-understood air quality issues from gas cooking, radon, mold, etc. So we have all these irritants in the air, and we have the most airtight homes in human history by orders of magnitude… what did we think was going to happen? That you could slap a laughably undersized carbon filter on an air purifier and call it good? Or that a limited number of too-small ERV systems would help? At some point we will need a radical rethinking of our approach to health and safety of new technology.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago
Houses weren’t so much better, but people are living in those houses longer (well, that’s true about all cancers). Perhaps one reason California life expectancy is better than other states is that they can mostly keep their windows open year round.
Quarrel 1y ago
Why do you think this? There is an entire article linked here, saying that they, Scientists, don't know what the causes are, even though they're actively trying to search for a cause.
- xnorswap 1y ago
  HN can be infuriating sometimes. Imagine if there was an environmental science forum that sat around pontificating with mistrust about software performance. Chances are people would mock it and marvel at their ignorance. But here we have a forum of (largely) software developers looking at the experts on environmental health and going, "Why are they so stupid? It's obviously <radon> <modern junk> <etc>". It's not limited to environmental health, it affects all kinds of articles on social sciences. Commentary full of people who aren't domain experts wondering why the domain experts are all so clueless because Mr Software Engineer has it all figured out.
  - owenversteeg 1y ago
    Perhaps you are just a simple software developer, but there are plenty of people here who are genuine experts in every field imaginable: I have had intelligent discussions here with everyone from neuroscientists to microbiologists to carpenters to machinists. More to your point, I think the modern idea that people must stay confined to their specialty is ridiculous. Not long ago it was common to have intelligent discussions - or do serious work - on topics where you had no formal education or experience. All of that occurred without the internet. Look at the early days of, for example, the Manhattan Project. Not a trivial undertaking, and yet many of the men did countless tasks where they had zero training or experience. Look at the history of any scientific field or large engineering project. For all of human history that is how it was: and now if you want to replace a toilet valve, or a lightswitch, or comment about a scientific topic, you must hire someone with the appropriate credentials. Back to my point - as a matter of fact I do have a professional perspective on the question of indoor air pollutants. Perhaps not the credentials you seek, nevertheless: I develop consumer products for the home, and levels of indoor air pollutants are now high enough - due to precisely the causes I originally mentioned - that they are beginning to cause nasty interactions that destroy the products of my industry via fouling and corrosion. In fact, the professional associations for my industry have written extensively about the scale of the problem and several companies have invested significantly in R&D to identity solutions. In other words, the air we breathe is damaging the things around us; could it not damage our lungs as well? I do not make any absolute statements, but I think a serious discussion should be had and I see no reason that it shouldn’t also happen on HN.
    - xnorswap 1y ago
      I note that you picked two hard sciences as markers of respect, "neuroscientists and microbiologists", not social sciences. Secondly my point I'm trying to make, is that these aren't "intelligent discussions" nor "serious discussion". Shunning swathes of social science, often treating their conclusions as either illegitimate ( if they go counter to their preferred narrative ), or as obvious ( if they aren't ). It's demeaning to "just ask questions" as if they hadn't been considered by the experts of the field.
- owenversteeg 1y ago
  So, first of all, trusting the NYT - or most major newspapers - on any article involving “science” is… somewhere between delusional and hilarious. They get things wrong at roughly the same frequency as a Facebook meme page. Secondly: “Scientists” are not some monolithic group. On any subject you can imagine there are scientists claiming they know all, some claiming we know nothing, some with hypothesis A and some with B and some with Z. Finally… I outlined a reasonable mechanism in my comment (indoor air pollutants increasing by orders of magnitude; home air tightness increasing by orders of magnitude; many of these pollutants are known to increase the risk of lung cancer.) Why not debate the argument itself, instead of making appeals to authority?

seanmcdirmid 1y ago

Houses weren’t so much better, but people are living in those houses longer (well, that’s true about all cancers). Perhaps one reason California life expectancy is better than other states is that they can mostly keep their windows open year round.

Quarrel 1y ago

Why do you think this? There is an entire article linked here, saying that they, Scientists, don't know what the causes are, even though they're actively trying to search for a cause.

xnorswap 1y ago
HN can be infuriating sometimes. Imagine if there was an environmental science forum that sat around pontificating with mistrust about software performance. Chances are people would mock it and marvel at their ignorance. But here we have a forum of (largely) software developers looking at the experts on environmental health and going, "Why are they so stupid? It's obviously <radon> <modern junk> <etc>". It's not limited to environmental health, it affects all kinds of articles on social sciences. Commentary full of people who aren't domain experts wondering why the domain experts are all so clueless because Mr Software Engineer has it all figured out.
- owenversteeg 1y ago
  Perhaps you are just a simple software developer, but there are plenty of people here who are genuine experts in every field imaginable: I have had intelligent discussions here with everyone from neuroscientists to microbiologists to carpenters to machinists. More to your point, I think the modern idea that people must stay confined to their specialty is ridiculous. Not long ago it was common to have intelligent discussions - or do serious work - on topics where you had no formal education or experience. All of that occurred without the internet. Look at the early days of, for example, the Manhattan Project. Not a trivial undertaking, and yet many of the men did countless tasks where they had zero training or experience. Look at the history of any scientific field or large engineering project. For all of human history that is how it was: and now if you want to replace a toilet valve, or a lightswitch, or comment about a scientific topic, you must hire someone with the appropriate credentials. Back to my point - as a matter of fact I do have a professional perspective on the question of indoor air pollutants. Perhaps not the credentials you seek, nevertheless: I develop consumer products for the home, and levels of indoor air pollutants are now high enough - due to precisely the causes I originally mentioned - that they are beginning to cause nasty interactions that destroy the products of my industry via fouling and corrosion. In fact, the professional associations for my industry have written extensively about the scale of the problem and several companies have invested significantly in R&D to identity solutions. In other words, the air we breathe is damaging the things around us; could it not damage our lungs as well? I do not make any absolute statements, but I think a serious discussion should be had and I see no reason that it shouldn’t also happen on HN.
  - xnorswap 1y ago
    I note that you picked two hard sciences as markers of respect, "neuroscientists and microbiologists", not social sciences. Secondly my point I'm trying to make, is that these aren't "intelligent discussions" nor "serious discussion". Shunning swathes of social science, often treating their conclusions as either illegitimate ( if they go counter to their preferred narrative ), or as obvious ( if they aren't ). It's demeaning to "just ask questions" as if they hadn't been considered by the experts of the field.
owenversteeg 1y ago
So, first of all, trusting the NYT - or most major newspapers - on any article involving “science” is… somewhere between delusional and hilarious. They get things wrong at roughly the same frequency as a Facebook meme page. Secondly: “Scientists” are not some monolithic group. On any subject you can imagine there are scientists claiming they know all, some claiming we know nothing, some with hypothesis A and some with B and some with Z. Finally… I outlined a reasonable mechanism in my comment (indoor air pollutants increasing by orders of magnitude; home air tightness increasing by orders of magnitude; many of these pollutants are known to increase the risk of lung cancer.) Why not debate the argument itself, instead of making appeals to authority?