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NYT and vaping: How to lie by saying only true things (2022)
- like_any_other 5mo agoI sure am glad such deception is limited to that one vaping article.
- YZF 5mo agoSome people might not realize there's a /s in there.
- zrezzed 5mo agoI’m disappointed this is the first comment on this post. gwern’s writing (including on nicotine) was formative for me; it showed me how and why the internet the was important: it let me read good, well written thinking I had never seen from the NYTs or my parents. I first saw a link to gwern.net on HN. And I trusted the NYTs as an institution then, and do to this day… and I’m sure I clicked through, and took the gwern post seriously in part because comments weren’t universally negative. You can point to bounded trust problems, or talk more about how “The Media Very Rarely Lies”… But please don’t take up the first comment on a gwern post to cheap shot the NYTs
- lacewing 5mo agoMeh. Writing like this was formative for me (before Gwern; I'm old), but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else. It just manifests in a different way? It boils down to an obvious disparity in the standard of proof they demand for "pet" topics versus what they need for everything else. You can do this kind of ultra-nitpicky "rational inquiry" to undermine anything you don't like. You can use it to argue against seatbelts. Or against the ban on lead paint. Was lead paint really all that bad?... and I mean, really? Are there studies? Are they high quality enough?... Double-blind? Confounding factors? Correlation or causation? Even if they look solid, I bet they contain enough errors to cast doubt. Cui bono? What was the role of the titanium dioxide lobby in all this? For nicotine specifically, I've been around enough people seriously addicted to nicotine to just roll my eyes at this stuff. I had things thrown at me by a visibly jittery relative when I refused to smuggle cigarettes into a hospital. Do I have a published double-blind study showing that it's worse than coffee? No. But again, neither do rationalists for 99% of the stuff they believe in. Do I think that vapes are a noteworthy problem to be focusing on? Maybe not, but public policy is always to some extent vibe-based. And the harm of being too heavy-handed on vapes is really not something that keeps me up at night.
- card_zero 5mo agoThey insinuated that the ordinary vapes caused serious lung injury. The blame lay elsewhere, but you think it's fine to shift it around to your preferred target.
- lacewing 5mo agoNo. I was answering to parent's broader comment about "formative" writings on nicotine. And I was making my own broader point that the NYT piece is biased, but selective evidence-seeking in the rationalist community doesn't deserve any special praise.
- moravak1984 5mo ago> Meh. Writing like this was formative for me (before Gwern; I'm old), but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else. It just manifests in a different way? Could you point out to some examples? Is there any "rational inquiry" that shows a worldview bias from the rationalists, in your opinion? I agree that the broader smarty-pants community may have this issue, just curious to read your examples. I think this nicely pointed out in "The Big Bang Theory", where Sheldon Cooper says something like "If I would be wrong, don't you think I would know about it?" That sounds like something Elmo M would say with a serious face.
- saagarjha 5mo agoRationalists are not necessarily better at thinking than you are, they're just usually better cited. That isn't to say there isn't value in being able to cite your beliefs, but if you try very hard you can find data that justifies just about anything, omit nontrivial externalities, and expect any arbitrarily high standard of evidence because that is what you need to think well and good, when in fact they just spend more time being comfortable with conversations that involve p-values and metacognition than you are and will seek to draw you onto their home turf for that discussion. In this case, for example, I doubt that Gwern is seeking to mislead, but I have heard (hearsay, I know) that there are people who read this, start vaping, and legitimately end up with nicotine additions from much worse stuff. Sure, there's nothing false said here, but you can definitely say only true things about vapes and neglect to mention that your readers of this have ended up more likely to die of lung cancer than they might have had you not published this. I think someone who was truly rationalist would find that in itself an interesting topic of conversation but it seems to rarely come up that being super pedantic often leads to negative outcomes because presumably this would make them shine a mirror at themselves in a way that they are almost intentionally incapable of discussing.
- like_any_other 5mo ago[flagged]
- cwillu 5mo agoThe problem with gwern posts is that there are so rarely anything to nitpick, to spark conversation in the comments.
- card_zero 5mo agoI'm unclear on the NYT motivation. "Let's pin it on the nicotine vapes," why? Scare stories sell papers, I guess.
- paleotrope 5mo agoOn the surface level there were some political initiatives by various parties to regulate vapes more strictly at the time. On a deeper level you have several interested parties (vaping companies, tobacco companies, public health interests that get funding for whatever reasons) that stand to lose or gain alot of money depending on how it's regulated. Or you you might even have politicians looking for donations from the people that are selling vapes or more likely, politicians that are seeing a potential new tax revenue source and our feeling out the level of opposition or support for it. I don't think the NYTs goes for scare stories for the most part.
- olalonde 5mo agoApparently, a lot of people blame his nicotine article for getting addicted to nicotine.
- saagarjha 5mo agoThere is plenty of stuff to nitpick but it's the kind of thing that internet commenters who read his articles dismiss as poorly reasoned because it involves indirect social impact and presentation rather than content.
- paleotrope 5mo agoGlad they wrote this, but then some people have been reading the "news" like this for decades.
- slopinthebag 5mo agoI vaped for a couple months but stopped when I started to have my heart race when I would stand up suddenly. Ears started to crackle as well. Not saying the article is wrong, but I think there are probably good reasons to chose alternatives...
- loeg 5mo ago> Not saying the article is wrong, but I think there are probably good reasons to chose alternatives... This concern is addressed in the article. > it would be possible to write this story without bringing in irrelevant THC-contaminated anecdotes or EVALI, by focusing on legitimate criticisms of nicotine vaping. (You could discuss teen access, flavor marketing, age checks, FDA jurisdiction, statutory drafting, the economics of disposable devices, and the adult harm-reduction case without ever mentioning EVALI which you know is not related to teen access to legal anything.)
- slopinthebag 5mo agoI don't see how any of that is relevant to what I said. If you need nic, snus is by far the best for you.
- loeg 5mo agoYou're discussing legitimate criticisms of nicotine vaping; the article isn't opposed to that, it just explicitly isn't a focus.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- scarmig 5mo agoOne of the more amusing things about the vape panic is that it's now easier to purchase fentanyl adulterated meth in San Francisco than it is to get a Juul pod. And it's riskier to be a seller of the latter than the former. Public health officials are throwing their credibility into a bonfire when they land on a fixation and use heavy handed strategies to pursue their goals, without a sense of proportionality or efficacy.
- saagarjha 5mo agoI genuinely have no idea how to purchase fentanyl adulterated meth in San Francisco despite residing there. I assume there is probably some guy who knows a guy who might hook me up but it would be pretty sketchy. On the flip side I can literally type "vape shop" into Google and get a handful of options in walking distance that I could stroll into legally and purchase whatever I wanted, as long as it was not flavored. That too is something Google is happy to share with me.
- scarmig 5mo agoI live in San Francisco too and know how to get both. The vape shops sell only vape equipment, in theory; in practice, they "secretly" sell vapes behind the counter, but you have to ask for it (and occasionally they'll say they don't have any; hard to predict and plan for). And selection is limited to gaudy, giant flavored Chinese vape brands of unknown provenance; Juul is nowhere to be found. Meth, with varying levels of fentanyl adulteration, you can get delivered or buy from the street corner, depending on your neighborhood. From where I am, I'd estimate about 10 minutes to get a hold of the meth; 20 minutes to get a hold of any vape; and Juul probably an hour (place in Daly City sells them; I'd have to drive).
- teravor 5mo agonearly all the value in a news article comes from the collation of facts needed to formulate it. i would much rather read this collation directly, give me bullet points. in such a structured format it would also be easier to analyze if a given statement is too specific or has too many qualifiers. it would also be easier to notice what's missing.
- Calvin02 5mo agoThis doesn't surprise me. I grew up reading NYTimes on the weekend with my parents. I held them in extreme high regard when it came to their news and journalistic integrity. Over the years, I've shifted to think of them as another data point. For the industries that I'm most familiar with (Tech, Finance, and Pharma), I find their reporting often shallow, lacking in nuance, or intentional/unintentional misreporting. And I often wonder if their reporting of other areas is similarly lacking. Now, they are just another data point, which is sad.
- Pay08 5mo agoHonestly, they have never been particularly trustworthy. People go on about the "newspaper of record" title, but as far as I can see, those are mainly handed out on the basis of age, not actual quality and journalistic integrity.
- sho 5mo agoSame story with me. To be clear, I am a subscriber, though I tend to hold out for the ultra-cheap last ditch retention deals they through at you. But I take them with a grain of salt these days. They have a narrative like anywhere else, and they don't let the full facts get in its way. Michael Crichton said it best: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
- pram 5mo agoThe NYT (and Judith Miller) was one of the most shameless shills of the Iraq War, laundering complete bullshit and lies. It’s not completely bad, there have been outstanding individuals, and the election coverage is still the best imo, but there is no reason to believe the organization has higher integrity than the rest of the MSM.
- arjie 5mo agoA very well-done read through of the article. Another top-notch work from Gwern[0]. I've found that this kind of sophistry is quite common in some circles. For instance, for things for which you want funding to be cut "only x% of the money went to y" while for things for which you want funding to not be cut "the things the money goes to include a, b, and c". The "include a, b, and c" is true but perhaps not informative. There are quite a few of these ways to make weasel arguments where each sentence is true, and the reasoning is nonetheless fallacious or motivated. I've been trying to find a place where people write down these tricks so that I can at least name and classify them for myself. There's one that particularly gets me, a kind of false aggregation. Say breast cancer is 99% treatable and costs $1m and prostate cancer is 1% treatable and the most you'd spend is $1k. Suppose someone said "cancers can be as bad as 1% treatable while attempts can be up to $1m to do". Well, that makes it sound like there's a cancer where you spend a mil and it's 1%. This kind of false aggregation obscures the truth. It would be useful to me so I can concisely name this kind of thing and then work with it to preserve epistemic hygiene. 0: The distinctively beautiful website is brand enough haha
- queenkjuul 5mo agoI abandoned NYT when they ran cover for Iraq. How that wasn't a death sentence for US papers says a lot imo
- vkou 5mo agoWhy would it be? People love patriotically murdering a bunch of other people in a place that never lifted a finger against them. It shows us that we are strong, and others are weak, and that we need to attack the weak before they become strong and destroy us. This sort of shit sells like hotcakes.
- internet_points 5mo agoAlso those pictures of the tyrant's statue being torn down, very newsfriendly. Maybe we can have another round of those soon without even travelling outside the US.
- kleton 5mo agoTruly a case where the old word polytropōs applies.
- beloch 5mo agoIronically, this article is guilty of the same thing it rails against. No evidence is provided for the safety of THC vaping products. An NYT article that was clearly biased against THC was picked apart instead. The clear implication is that THC vapes were unjustly targeted and readers should assume the contrary of the dishonest NYT article. i.e. That THC vapes are safe. Yet, no direct evidence of that is provided. A possibly fatal lie is told purely with true facts. Here's why that matters: THC is a recreational product. It's relatively recent legalization in only some jurisdictions is why we're just starting to get good data on it. Vaping is even newer and less well studied. Okay, so let's say there's no clear evidence that THC vapes are harmful. I'm being a dishonest fear-monger. Or am I? What should be the default position on recreational drugs? Specifically, ones that are inhaled? Ask a respirologist. Lungs are delicate and, if you screw yours up, you're really fubar'd. They'll tell you that, if you do want to use a relatively unstudied recreational drug, eat it or shove it up your ass. (Seriously, THC enemas are a thing.) Don't put it in your lungs. The default position for inhaling drugs should be, "Don't" until they're proven safe. This is my opinion/bias/dishonest-agenda.
- nerdsniper 5mo agoIn general for me, the default position for recreational activities should be “okay” until they’re proven dangerous to others. Wanna jump out of an airplane with no parachute and see if one of your buddies can strap one on you before you hit the ground? Totally fine with me. Wanna base-jump off a skyscraper in NYC with a wing-suit ? Fuck off. You’ll probably hurt someone else who didn’t sign up for that. That said, I’d also like the CPSC to look into whether products like this are safe and hold manufacturers accountable for their consequences. I’d also very much appreciate it if the FTC and FDA actually did thorough random testing of drugs and supplements (recreational or therapeutic) to ensure that the actual ingredients and doses match the label. The FDA requires drug manufacturers to be in compliance, but doesn’t actually test drugs themselves, they mostly just look over paperwork to see if the processes followed would probably produce the correct product and assume the paperwork isn’t manipulated. In fact, the FDA actively works to prevent people, even the Pentagon, from doing independent 3rd party drug testing of common pharmaceuticals [0] 0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-12-05/pentagon-is-skeptical-of-cheap-generic-drugs-approved-by-the-fda https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-12-05/pentagon-... / https://archive.is/eyWSn https://archive.is/eyWSn
- jmull 5mo agoLet's not forget: the vaping business model is to turn kids into addicts and then keep selling them the drug. I'm not exactly going to get outraged at the NYT's rhetorical tactics against vaping.
- bityard 5mo agoDo you believe the NYT's activist biases will always line up perfectly with yours?
- yrjrjjrjjtjjr 5mo agoIf I tell a lie to support a good cause and you tell a lie to support the same cause and a third and a fourth person do the same thing then, then, being so propped up by lies how can we be sure it even is a good cause worth lying for? In this way, the harms of lying compound while the benefits do not. For this reason I believe it highly unwise to allow it to be normalized.
- trixn 5mo agoWhile that might be true there is still a point to be considered regarding vaping which is that it is an order of magnitute less harmful than smoking tabacco cigarettes because nothing is burned in a vape and the "burning stuff" is what makes normal smoking so harmful. Therefore I'd argue it should definitely be available for smokers at a price tag lower than cigarettes if they can't quit smoking to reduce harm. This would massively decrease the huge costs for health care.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- CamelCaseCondo 5mo agoSo one thing that always strikes me about vaping is that we ignore the metal heater. It’ a coil of metal that glows, during which it will boil off metal atoms. After a while it has lost so much material that is breaks and needs to be replaced. That metal went into your lungs.
- marysol5 5mo agoGot a source on that one?
- genewitch 5mo agothey do not. Even hair dryer coils don't generally glow, and the old vapes used the same wires, at sub-1% of the wattage. 5-8W instead of 800-1500W. That wire was called "Kanthal", and for a while vapes went to nichrome and titanium and various other things. I am unsure what the "gold standard" is now, but i doubt it's still kanthal unless it's a cheap chinese vape "bar". anyhow, as other people and myself said already, the metal never gets hot enough to incandesce, not even remotely close!
- echoangle 5mo agoDoes the heater really break by becoming so thin that it mechanically disconnects? I don’t use a vape but from coil replacement guides it sounds like people replace the coil because it begins to taste bad due to the burned stuff sticking to it. Probably not much more healthy but I don’t really see how you would be ingesting much more metal from that compared to your metal frying pan for example.
- genewitch 5mo agoDisposable vapes don't have this issue. <-period. you throw the pod away before any sort of degradation to the coil and the wick. That being said... The coil becomes brittle from interacting with the liquid and usually breaks contact when refilling or if dropped. what actually happens is the wick goes bad or burns, and won't "wet" the coil anymore; or you use an e-liquid/e-juice with a lot of sweeteners and the coil gets caked with burnt sweetener and can't fire anymore. But that's if you're negligent with a DIY or "hand wound" or "drip" vape, where you're using the same coil for a very long time (weeks, depending), and it depends on the liquid, the liquids that taste/smell like bakery/confections absolutely cover coils with gunk that you have to remove the wadding (usually cotton or silicone wicking material, unbleached), and do a dry-fire to burn all the junk off. This smells awful and i usually did it by hanging the thing out a car window and firing it just so i didn't have to smell it. I personally used specialty "wire" that's real thin wire that's twisted to make it thicker, both to make it handle more heat (lower resistance means more voltage can be put in) and last longer, due to less heat stress. 90% of the time when a coil broke for me, it broke where the coil connects to the leg that goes to the terminal block, and rarely the leg would snap at the terminal block instead of the coil, and maybe 2 times the coil broke somewhere along the length. in a little over a decade of use of "rebuildable drip atomizers." The disposable and pod-based vapes don't have any of these issues because say 9000-18000 "puffs" of 0.5s or longer and you're supposed to dispose of it. With one of the RJR or PMJ vape brands, they're not refillable, so you just throw the pod away; with the "bar" vapes, you throw the whole bar, battery and all, in the trash. I really advocate for the "refillable pod" and "drip" or "drip tank" vapes, just from an ecological standpoint. Uwell, VodPod(stylized and possibly spelled 'voopoo') make decent pod-based ones, where the device, a pack of 2 pods, and a bottle of e-liquid to fill it with cost about the same as a Vuze device and a 6-pack of pods for the Vuze. And if you're a "heavy user" a 6 pack is < 1 week of vaping; so hands down doing it with your own device and liquid is cheaper, for sure. additionally there's a difference between "mouth to lung" and "Direct to lung" vape devices/pods. MTL is like a cigarette, you draw into your mouth, then inhale into your lungs. DTL is like a hookah or bong, you "breathe" in through the device. I used to prefer DTL but i use MTL now. the vuze and other tiny pod disposable vapes are Mouth to Lung devices. TL;dr: No. Generally the disposable ones from the two big tobacco companies are "safe" given the GP and your queries. the "bar" ones, like "elf bar" or whatever, i am not sure. There's been QC issues and other reported problems with that type, but they're generally <18000 "puffs" and that, in my opinion that borders on being "dumb". The big vapes you see people using? those are probably safer than even the RJR/PMJ ones, unless the tank is metal. Then you can't be sure, that's up to the user! Note: the closest thing to vaping prior to vaping was a hookah vis-à-vis nicotine, and a nebulizer, vis-à-vis vaporizing "drugs." They even make things that vaporize marijuana, straight from a grinder, these days. But heating something to create a vapor to inhale isn't "new"! In fact, the first "e-cig" i ever saw was used by a friend in 2009 or so, and he said it was sold as an "Portable Electronic Hookah". It was a DTL device, with a tank and replaceable wick/coil "cartridge". Most DTL are "replaceable cartridge coil/wick" tanks, and most MTL are "pods"
- throwworhtthrow 5mo agoI think the only one lying here is Gwern for calling the NYT liars. Gwern's claim is that by discussing someone's vape-induced injury in an article about flavored nicotine vaping, NYT misleads, because they are different vape product lines. The implication is that there cannot be an honest reason to mention the injury in this context. I disagree (as does the injured teenager, according to her quote in the article). I think it could also be understood as explaining that teens who enter the vaping market by way of flavored nicotine also have more exposure to the illegal products that caused the injury. Gwern's evidence that NYT succeeded in their deception campaign is... riled-up internet commentators in the comments section who think vaping is evil. Which doesn't mean much because [pardon my cheekiness here] a) every comments section on every article everywhere on the internet is full of riled-up people, and b) we all know no one reads the article before commenting, therefore these outraged commentators must have developed their opinions without the aid of the NYT.
- bonsai_spool 5mo agoI am in medicine and have found that Gwern's articles in this area are at least heterodox if not outright incorrect. Before starting in medicine, I also found the style of writing persuasive but I think essays in this vein reflect a cultural difference and are not, as they purport, uncovering deep conspiracy. Fundamentally, it is hard to know things in medicine, though we are rightfully all entitled to our opinion. This is because good studies are hard to do, and often we need several studies to be confident that we understand a mechanism fully. Here, the crux is whether we assume that Gwern's uncited Vitamin E Acetate reference is true (i.e., nicotine vapes are fine since they don't have this compound) without any evidence outside a link to wikipedia. I do not [see for example ref 1, with the caveat that we can't really tell if VEA is in use illegally]. We also are four years out from the NYT article and comfortably looking back with knowledge unavailable at the time (to wit, Gwern's assertion that EVALI has fallen with the reduction in VEA use). I accept the point that the NYT article in question[2] may be wrong in equating damage linked to THC vapes and nicotine vapes. However, what should we do when a new recreational drug category is associated with disease? Accept manufacturer-provided explanations ("Well, this opioid is actually less addictive than others and shouldn't be regulated the same!")? Or take categorical action while awaiting new information? Medicine takes the latter approach. I accept that we should all be able to do what we wish to our bodies, but reject that the State should abet us in these efforts. As an aside, teens falling ill (the subject of the original article) leads to a lot more social impact than would occur if an adult takes up a recreational drug. There's the actual illness, lost education, potential developmental delay, impacts on the teen's friend group, moral injury to the medical team, and likely more. This would be a separate reason to be more strident in regulating new recreational drugs targeted at minors. 1. https://www.trillianthealth.com/market-research/studies/evali-encounters-remain-above-2020-baseline-as-vaping-prevalence-among-adolescents-and-young-adults-grows https://www.trillianthealth.com/market-research/studies/eval... 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/health/vaping-fda-nicotine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/health/vaping-fda-nicotin...
- Scroll_Swe 5mo ago[flagged]
- lovich 5mo agoOh, ok. I checked this guys account after he got aggressive with me. This is another <1 month old account spreading division across the board. Yay for how cheap clawd bots are and how frequently they are used to divide society. In the rare event that you are not actually a bot, then I sincerely hope you have a long and painful disease leading to an end of life.
- Scroll_Swe 5mo agoNot a bot, just a new account. If you want the site to freeze account creation take that up with the mods. The irony of wishing someone a painful death because you suspect them of "spreading division" is lost on you. My opinions come from research and personal experience, that's called having a perspective, not being a bot. You're doing the classic Reddit move: when you can't argue the point, call it a troll account. I'm a real white Swedish person saddened by the death of my country on a real PC. Happy to verify, Discord, photo, whatever. But I suspect you're not actually interested in that.
- lovich 5mo agoYou are correct that I am not interested in you proving your race or citizenship, don’t know why you’d bring it up. And you misconstrue my point. I was saying you are either a bot and should be ignored or a real person with real beliefs in which case I hope there is a just god who delivers you your karmic rewards.
- Scroll_Swe 5mo agoLet us be clear here, you wish for a real human to die. This would be against the ToS of this site. Very Stalin of you, so it does fit people like you! You said "then I sincerely hope you have a long and painful disease leading to an end of life."
- kart23 5mo agoI don’t know if the authors framing that the comments got duped is exactly right. I think most of the comments are upset that kids are addicted to vaping nicotine which is definitely true. also, the first reader comment literally says: “Vaping hasn’t been shown to be unsafe scientifically“