16 ms·

The Fireplace Delusion

322 points by uvdiv 14y ago

uvdiv 14y ago
Here's a free PDF of the toxicology paper he cites: "Woodsmoke Health Effects: A Review" http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/publications/2006%20pubs/JIT%20Woodsmoke2.pdf http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/publications/2006%20pubs... (update): More supporting references here (he should have linked this one): http://www.epa.gov/burnwise/pdfs/woodsmoke_health_effects_jan07.pdf http://www.epa.gov/burnwise/pdfs/woodsmoke_health_effects_ja...
- anemic 14y ago
  I tried to look where the claim "Research shows that nearly 70 percent of chimney smoke reenters nearby buildings." comes from as I find it interesting. In the "woodsmoke health effects" paper it references this: Pierson, W. E., Koenig, J. Q., and Bardana, E. J., 1989. Potential adverse health effects of wood smoke. West J. Med. 151: 339-342. which is found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1026893/pdf/westjmed00121-0093.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1026893/pdf/west... And it says: > Also, about 70% of the outdoor wood smoke reenters the house (T. V. Larson, PhD, University of Washington, Department of Civil Engineering, unpublished data). First, the article is from 1989 and it's not known when the T.V. Larsons data is collected. Also wouldn't for example the density of the houses or the type of the houses and their ventilation and filtering affect this result? How much? Secondly somehow the original article mentions that the smoke reenters the house, which I understand is the same house with the stove/fireplace, but in the "woodsmoke health effects" paper it has transformed to "can actually reenter the home and neighborhood dwellings"?
tomjen3 14y ago
Seems well argued. But we will never be able to ban stoves, fireplaces, etc.
- Adaptive 14y ago
  Maybe not ban, nor would we want to, but carbon credits could come into play and impact selection of home heating options, for example.
  - ars 14y ago
    I assume you mean carbon dioxide credits, not carbon credits. Because for fireplaces it would have to be actual carbon credits - fireplaces release lots of carbon into the air as pollution. Incidentally people should stop being lazy and say carbon dioxide when they mean carbon dioxide - otherwise it gets confusing in situations like this where fireplaces release both carbon dioxide, and carbon, into the air.
    - Adaptive 14y ago
      I specifically meant carbon credits. E.g. price of, for example, wood burning stoves could build in a fee/tax charged to manufacturers or importers given the nature of the product. It's not just the air pollution, it's also cutting down trees, though at least when we cut it was usually clearing farm land. As for existing fireplaces/stoves, I suppose a tax could be levied if they are the primary heat source. There are already lots of incentive based energy efficiency city and statewide programs around the nation that factor in heating method (and a lot of people eyeing the carbon credit "mining" in that case as well).
      - ghaff 14y ago
        It may be expired now, but a couple of years ago there was actually a tax credit for putting in a wood stove.
    - eloisant 14y ago
      You're actually thinking about carbon dioxide (CO2) and carbon monoxide (CO). Carbon is just the atom (C), and both carbon CO2 and CO are carbon-based molecules.
      - ars 14y ago
- MarkSweep 14y ago
  Actually one city in silicon valley has already banned building new wood-burning fireplaces: http://www.losaltosonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12240&Itemid=46 http://www.losaltosonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&#...
- myelin 14y ago
  My hometown in New Zealand has been working to ban open fires for over a decade, due to their contribution to the city's terrible winter-time air quality. (Not helped by a temperature inversion that causes the smoke to stay near the ground rather than rise and blow away.)
- VLM 14y ago
  Where I live insurance is hyper-regulated and required if you have a mortgage, and I'm not sure exactly how much or how little social engineering input the EPA had, but you're looking at your home insurance bill going up by about $2000 annually if you have a wood burner of any type in your house. Note this isn't silicon valley, and the national median household income is almost exactly $50K, so for more than half the homes in america, you're talking about a "tax" in excess of 4% of gross income merely for the privilege of owning a woodburner. A tax by any other name... Add to that the cost of obtaining wood, and the substantial mostly product liability costs of a decent wood stove (more than a grand or two) and you've changed owning a woodburner from something any joe 6 pack can have in his house to pretty much elites only. Sure, technically there's no official ban, but spending 5% of my annual income is kinda extreme as a hobby..
  - eloisant 14y ago
    In France there is no premium on insurance if you have a fireplace or stove, but you have to declare it, keep it to the norms and do the mandatory yearly check by a professional.
sawyer 14y ago
Great example of how to make seculars feel like religious people when confronted with science; and actually quite educational! I had no idea wood smoke was harmful, but am now glad the fireplace in my living room is gas, heh.
- rimantas 14y ago
  This is very very bad example. We do know thas some things are bad for us but still are willing to risk anyway. Alcohol, tobacco? I did not think much about how dangerous smoke is but it is no surprise that it is no good (smoke is particles, it cannot be good anyway). That won't stop me from enjoying a few evenings by bonfire each year. Author chose really bad analogy there and had to stretch it beyond of the breaking point.
Adaptive 14y ago
Refusing to "believe" that fireplaces is bad is simply indulgent and intellectually lazy. I grew up felling trees, cutting wood and burning it all winter long. Yet my fellow bleeding heart environmentalist friends and I have no trouble identifying what a horror wood burning is now. Sam needs new friends.
lukifer 14y ago
Anecdotally, this seems right to me; anytime I use the fireplace, I wake up with a cough the next morning. The framing device of belief systems is interesting. My reaction was to immediately accept his statements as highly probable, but also accept that for now, I'll keep using the fireplace anyway, although maybe less often. But I've no doubt that many self-proclaimed rationalists would jump backflips to maintain what they want to be true. The more I observe human behavior, the more it seems that religious belief is the norm, not the exception. Believers and non-believers alike cement ideas in their head which are indifferent to reality and hard to dislodge. Sometimes this is due to social bonds, or low-level emotional associations, or a support structure for identity/ego; often, it's just plain habit. Nobody likes to feel the rug pulled out from under them. (Okay: I like it just a little.)
- kbenson 14y ago
  > Nobody likes to feel the rug pulled out from under them. (Okay: I like it just a little.) Me too. Although I find it dependent on what rug I'm standing on. I have a feeling it depends on how core that belief is to how I base my personality and life decisions. In short, it probably breaks down to the amount of time I have invested into it. (If I've recently adopted some belief, I imagine it's easier to accept change or even invalidation than if I spent 20 years with it).
- kijin 14y ago
  > Believers and non-believers alike cement ideas in their head which are indifferent to reality and hard to dislodge. When such ideas acquire a (more or less) self-consistent philosophical theory to back them up, and social institutions to promote them, that's what most people call religion. Sometimes we also call them ideologies or traditions. Some have supernatural elements and some don't, but their cognitive and social functions seem to be mostly the same.
- svantana 14y ago
  I am one of those few people who enjoy having my beliefs being disproven - and I guess there are plenty of us here on HN. Most likely people with this predisposition are drawn to science; after all, refuting hypotheses is what science is all about.
nraynaud 14y ago
There is something to be careful of with this new piece of information, this is about accumulation, so don't freak about going to your firend's who as a chimey. It's about everyday smoke. On another level, it reminds us that human are creatures of psychology, this feeling of warms and wood smoke is important, we have to find some other ritual to replace it. Rituals are important to the society.
fmkamchatka 14y ago
I get the point but was is the impact of recreationally burning wood a few evenings in the winter or at a campfire. It seems, even from the article, that the repeated practice is bad but I don't think that at this point it would still be called recreational. It's similar to eating fast food. Every day, the consequences would be disastrous, but once in a blue moon that's a different story.
juice13 14y ago
Please stop making sane arguments. They cause me to think, and that's not good now is it?
Jach 14y ago
So I accept they're bad for me and my neighbors--how bad, roughly? I like wood fires, and intend to keep lighting them with about the same frequency as now (every 6-18 months or so), but is this going to take a year off my/my neighbors' life expectancy? Just like driving has a pretty high chance of death, I suspect it's "worth it" when the utilities come out. (Edit: Or as fmkamchatka mentioned in a better example, eating fast food every now and again.)
- meric 14y ago
  If burning a fire once is equal to taking 30 cigarettes, then I suppose taking 30 cigarettes every 6-18 months isn't that bad, in the big scheme of things.
clhodapp 14y ago
Honestly, I find myself easily convinced that burning wood is hazardous, though I do note that it is not something most people do all the time (nor is it addictive).
cmdli 14y ago
The overall point seems to be true, but that may just be because of previously held beliefs which I would like to confirm (much like the author suggests with fireplaces). I think people have a hard time accepting scientific fact because the reality of the situation is much more convincing. Many people live with fireplaces, so their reality is that they are not harmful, regardless of the science behind the hazard they pose. It's much like American football: so many people have either played it or know people that play it that the possibility of damage due to injuries seems unreal or at least acceptable to them, because they haven't seen the harm in their experience. Speaking from a personal viewpoint, I find that many rationalists put little value in peoples' opinions because they are "unsupported", ignoring the mountain of personal, anecdoctal evidence that the person has gained over their life, which is much more likely to be believed than the foreign research of far-off scientists.
- Nursie 14y ago
  "Many people live with fireplaces, so their reality is that they are not harmful" That's not reality though is it? And it could be compared to smoking - the reality is that it's very harmful, but for a very long time nobody really believed that. "I find that many rationalists put little value in peoples' opinions because they are "unsupported", ignoring the mountain of personal, anecdoctal evidence that the person has gained over their life, which is much more likely to be believed than the foreign research of far-off scientists." That's because in the modern world we know that there is actually little value to these things compared to a dispassionate analysis. I understand that this is why many people are slow to 'believe' research when it confronts their ideas though.
ishener 14y ago
Excellent example of how something that is natural and have been around for tens of thousands of years is worse than other artificial things that are manufactured in factories.
kijin 14y ago
I'm not sure if this is meant to be an attack on fireplaces that uses an analogy with religion, or an attack on religion that uses an analogy with fireplaces. Maybe it's both. In any case, I find the analogy rather distracting. All those paragraphs could have been better spent on comparing the energy efficiency and polluting effect of fireplaces with those of other methods of heating, and similar information. The danger of air pollution from fireplaces (in addition to the obvious implications on CO2 production) is an interesting and important topic on its own. There is no need to give the article an extra "edge" by dragging in the issue of religion vs. science -- which we already know Sam Harris is obsessed with. And he's really beginning to sound like an Emeritus professor who talks on and on about his pet theory in the Q&A session of everyone else's colloquium, whether it's related or not. Harris, Dawkins, etc. are very smart people, and they could do a lot of good in the world by doing their best to purge biases, politics and superstition of all kinds from undeniable facts. But I often feel that their pursuit of controversy for the sake of controversy actually does a disservice to human rationality. Burning wood is bad for the environment, and here are the numbers that say so, so let's stop doing it. Is it really so difficult to get that message across without adding any unnecessary politics to it? Disclaimer: I came from a country where real fireplaces are rare items that you only occasionally see in upscale coffee shops, which is probably why I find it easy to believe that they are indeed nasty things.
- fishtoaster 14y ago
  I think you missed the point a bit: the article was about scientific/religious discussion. The author was trying to make the reader (presumably an atheist and/or skeptic) feel the same emotional response that the religious feel when their beliefs are challenged. The whole woodsmoke thing was just an illustrative discussion: most people reading it will feel an instinctive negative reaction against having something they cherish so attacked, even with solid evidence. So, it's neither an attack on fireplaces or religion: it's an attempt to make skeptics empathize a bit with those they're trying to convince.
  - kijin 14y ago
    Thanks, I was probably approaching the article with the wrong expectations, leading to disappointment.
eitland 14y ago
Anyone wants to make a thread here on the long and the short carbon cycle? (The small being trees, animals etc growing old, rot, release the carbon, the long being trees, animals etc growing old, getting sealed under layers of soil and finally converted to coal or oil/gas?) Not meaning to take anything away from the toxicologi part but in a whole lot of places wood is still an energy source and would need to be replaced. Where I live we use (hydroelectric mostly) electricity for heating mostly which seems liek a genuine waste of high value electricity.
- tadfisher 14y ago
  You're right in that wood-burning is carbon-neutral over human lifespans, making it far better than, say, coal-burning power plants in terms of emissions. However, in the short term, wood-burning is problematic much like smog from driving is problematic. If cars burned nothing but renewable vegetable oil, and drive in places like Los Angeles the same amount that people drive today, smog would still be a problem for human health. I think the article overstates the risk a bit; high-efficiency wood stoves burn off much of the harmful gas and particulates and don't have visible emissions when they are working properly, for example. But that's not the point of the article.
hzay 14y ago
Firstly, none of my wood-burning-loving-friends would refuse to accept the truthiness of the wood-burning-is-bad theory after they look into the sources. They'd do the same of any other argument that interests them. I guess I'm luckier than the author is with respect to the openness of our friends. Secondly, when he says that the resistance you feel to new ideas is itself bad, I detect a suggestion that you ought to be less questioning than usual when someone claims something as "science", especially if it goes against your taste/interests. This is a dangerous suggestion because being an unquestioning science-fanboy is no better than being unquestioningly religious or being an unquestioning brand-fanboy or brand-hateboy. Among a lot of my facebook-friends, it is sacrilegious to suggest that global warming is perhaps not happening. I'm not drawing your attention to the truthiness of that idea but the fact that it is considered unacceptable to be ignorant or misinformed about that topic - you are instantly understood to be "unscientific" if you question it. OTOH, it is completely okay to be ignorant or misinformed about say, the runtime complexity of dijkstra's - you just "didn't know" and it can be explained to you. Thirdly, I didn't get the wood-burning thing at all because we don't have fireplaces in south india. At least I've never seen one here. Obviously I don't mean that you shouldn't talk about fireplaces but I wish more people and magazines realized that their readership is no longer purely american. I distinctly remember a statement by NASA a few years ago that said that nobody needs to worry about this upcoming meteor because there won't be any harm caused to anyone, everything is fine, there's an insignificantly tiny chance that it would hit north america. I know NASA is funded by the US govt. and all that but by now a lot of people in a lot of countries look to them as the forerunner in space research and I wish they'd realize that.
- uvdiv 14y ago
  Thirdly, I didn't get the wood-burning thing at all because we don't have fireplaces in south india. Aren't wood-burning stoves pretty common? Like these, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_India#Fuel_wood_and_biomass_burning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_India#Fuel_wo...
  - test001only 14y ago
    Exactly what I was going to say. Wood burning stoves are very common especially in villages and also among poor people as wood is more widely available and is cheaper than LPG. We ourself have wood burning stove as an alternate to the LPG stove because cooking in slow fire on a stone or iron vessel is considered to produce tastier and healthier food. I understood that wood smoke was harmful but that it contains carcinogens is new for me.
nostromo 14y ago
Discussing gun policy with a friend, I mentioned the Freakonomics statistic that having a pool on your property is 100 times more dangerous for your child's welfare than having a gun in the house. If you really want to see a certain subset of your friends squirm with cognitive dissonance, mention this. (I hope this doesn't start a flame war. The reason I bring up this particular example is because guns seem so ridiculously evil, while having a pool seems like every child's dream, yet the numbers tell a very different story in terms of perceived vs. actual danger.) Edit: I regret posting this; but I won't delete it so people know the context of the replies. Sorry HN!
- twiceaday 14y ago
  Define dangerous.
  - arbus 14y ago
    dangerous as in death by drowning vs death by shooting http://www.freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-5/ http://www.freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excer...
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- kkowalczyk 14y ago
  The flaw in this argument is that guns and pools have very different uses. You can't swim in a gun. Guns have no useful purpose. The fact that pools are more dangerous doesn't justify owning a gun, so there is no "cognitive dissonance" here. You don't want a gun in your house regardless of any other dangers that exists, just like you want to child proof the house. You want a pool for the same reason you want a bicycle: it provides lots of benefit. Ultimately we make a choice that the benefit of the pool or the benefit of a bicycle for the child is greater than the risk. We can't eliminate all the risk. We can eliminate unnecessary risk (like guns).
oelmekki 14y ago
I understand author is concerned about religious people hurted feelings, but just to be clear: is the point, here, that we shouldn't rectify obviously wrong people because we are sometime obviously wrong ourselves ? Sounds like a chewbacca defense to me.
- kbenson 14y ago
  I think he's trying to provide a reference point. "Here's a way that you may behave that is similar to the way you bemoan others behaving." It's my believe that reference points help further useful discussion, so I think this is a good thing.
  - oelmekki 14y ago
    I totally subscribe to this vision. I just would have read it more clearly in the article, that's kind of ambiguous, like : "1°) religious people are hurted when you argue with them, 2°) here is what you would feel in their place". Conclusion could be as well "stop arguing with religious people, you're wrong too" as "don't push their feeling too hard and have some compassion when explaining your arguments" :)
nnq 14y ago
The comparison is very bad: something like burning wood gives you small psychological comfort but no benefit, while something like religion brings quite a lot of benefits for a large segment of scientifically illiterate or psychologically "unstable" people (and besides basic school knowledge of science, most people are quite "illiterate" unfortunately, they lack the most important parts of experiment based reasoning, the skills to build clear and falsifiable hypotheses, a "true" understanding of evolution and why it works and so on...). Also, to make wood burning unnecessary, you only have to give people access to electric or gas heating, and after this only a few nostalgics will occasionally burn wood for "recreation". To make religion unnecessary, you'd need to educate people to quite a high level (scientific knowledge and reason can only replace religion once somebody gains quite a deep and intuitive understanding of both) and you'd also need to have a "socially healthy" society that promotes "healthy" relations among people (a completely unsolved problem imho, although we like to think otherwise!), replacing part of the socio-moral function of religion (basing morality on religion, you get an ugly but working system of "no-think ethics" that has a lot of bugs but works on "all platforms", not matter how irrational they may be). It's much harder to bring people to a high enough level of education, psychological health and "social health" than to just give them central heating. Religion is quite an ugly hack, but it solves quite a bunch of problems for quite a lot of people, although these are mostly "hard to measure" problems.
- Tichy 14y ago
  "after this only a few nostalgics will occasionally burn wood for "recreation"" Not true unfortunately - here in Germany wood burning has been trending in recent years, even though alternative means of heating are readily available. In fact most house owners probably equip both - gas/oil heating for the baseline comfort and wood for the coziness.
  - BudVVeezer 14y ago
    Same is true in parts of the US as well. Here in Maine, it costs 3.80$/gal for heating oil, but you can get wood for 100$/cord. This means I can heat my house with oil to the tune of about 3k/year, or wood for 400/year.
kkowalczyk 14y ago
Looks like very flawed analogy to me. It's one thing to believe in something when there is no rational reason for the belief (religion). It's completely different to not believe something just because someone says so. I don't know if burning wood is as harmful as the article says. Prior to reading it I had no data and if I were asked, I would indeed think that it's safe given that people were doing it since the dawn of human race and no one drops dead because they sat near fire. If a random smart aleck accosted me at a party and started telling me how it's sooo bad (which seems to be the article's author MO), I would brush him off, and that would have been a rational reaction. After reading this article I'm inclined to accept that burning wood is dangerous but I'm far from convinced - it's a single data point. The author is clearly so in love with his "clever" analogy that he can't help equating apples to oranges (a skepticism about a claim due to lack of expertise to evaluate whether it's true or false and an active, irrational belief that is internally inconsistent and whose many aspects have been refuted by science and at a level that is comprehensible to regular humans (like finding carbon-dated human remains older than the age of universe according to bible).
- rosser 14y ago
  I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but you've just made Harris' argument for him. Also, some science for your perusal can be found in uvdiv's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5355300 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5355300
- jaggederest 14y ago
  > no one drops dead because they sat near fire. Joan of Arc would have a word with you, I'm sure. The old Pratchett quote: "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
tolmasky 14y ago
I feel like I had a slightly different takeaway than the author intended to make: namely, that this is a great example of exactly the wrong way to make an argument. Maybe this was actually what he intended, but I don't think it was. But let me back track a bit. There is a lot to say here about choosing an antagonistic way of presenting an idea, but one tiny nitpick affected me in particular. I was actually following fine and agreeing perfectly well up until his proposed solution of solving everything by simply making a law. Now, the problem isn't necessarily that I don't think this is the best solution, but the fact that he clearly does not actually understand the libertarian position, and thus completely fails to convince me by using the wrong counter arguments to hypothetical objections he imagines I have. His assumption is that libertarians value ridiculous personal freedoms more than the environment, and thus spends his time explaining how much the externalities of wood burning outweigh whatever silly freedom I may be concerned with this week. This is equivalent to patronizing someone who is for drug legalization by explaining to them that, actually, drugs are bad, and that's why they need to be illegal silly. I think he can't fathom that I may actually be 100% in agreement with his goal (to reduce wood burning), and yet reach a completely different conclusion as to the method to achieve it. A big part of the libertarian argument is actually quite consequentialist: make this illegal and you may very well find the the amount of wood burning go up, or at least not decreasing at all. If its obvious to you that that's not the case, then it should be easy to prove. To convince me (and it is totally possible), I'd actually be curious to know things such as: is wood burning already decreasing on its own and thus not require a law and all sorts of strange enforcement practices? Are we sure that enforcing such a law wouldn't unexpectedly require another form of pollution (wouldn't be the first time an environmental law had that result). Have we really exhausted all other approaches including education on the subject? Etc. Etc. I get the sense that what he wants us to walk away with is "look how hard the truth can be to accept if you don't know it", but I think the real takeaway is seeing how little we understand our audience sometimes. Whether the argument is political or religious, the favored method of argumentation seems to be "shock and awe". Showing people that as it turns out, they're actually assholes and didn't even know it! Then following up by belittling their values and explaining why your values are more important. This rarely works. I think people's goals are actually way more aligned than we think they are, but understandably we have reached different conclusions on how to reach those goals (again, the drug legalization issue is a great example). To finally bring it full circle, I think this is certainly true of religious arguments. I'm certain there is a much better path than trying to beat into people's heads how stupid they've actually been their whole lives and how they're partially responsible for so much suffering in the world by perpetuating this "terrible" thing.
jacobolus 14y ago
This is absurdly hyperbolic. Few people are going to die because they made a wood fire in a fireplace 10-20 times a year. The reason wood fires cause serious health problems in the developing world is that they’re put in the center of a one-room house, with no chimney, and used for heating/cooking/etc. The whole room fills with smoke, to the point that eyes sting and it’s hard to breathe, and the smoke noticeably impacts visibility. The density of smoke in such a room is probably at least an order of magnitude greater than in a room with a fireplace and in the corner. Additionally, such houses are filled with wood smoke all day every day of the year. The hearth fire is an essential part of the home. [Source: my parents are anthropologists and I spent a substantial chunk of my childhood hanging out in this kind of home.] That said, I’ll absolutely agree that spending time in such an environment is dramatically more unpleasant than spending time in a room with several heavy smokers, and almost certainly more damaging. Which is why it seems ridiculous that a certain sort of person will both make a big stink about someone smoking nearby outdoors, and also romanticize rural peasant life and wax poetic about how much less toxic life used to be in the past.
- gizzlon 14y ago
  No chimney? Wtf? :) Where is this?
  - coolj 14y ago
    > in the developing world cf. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/22/AR2005052200772.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05...
    - gizzlon 14y ago
      Yeah, I misread your comment as "in the developed world..".. Having felt the effect of "fireplace smoke" without a chimney I find it strange that people live like that. OTOH, African houses are probably much more open than the house I'm used to..
- roel_v 14y ago
  "This is absurdly hyperbolic. Few people are going to die because they made a wood fire in a fireplace 10-20 times a year." Did you even read the linked papers? There is direct and plausible evidence that recreational wood burning in the West is a significant contributor to pollution in residential areas, with the pollution itself clearly linked to public health. So basically, you're flat out wrong (or arguing a straw man, if I take your comment literally) - yes, dozens of people are going to die each year because of recreational wood burning.
stephen_g 14y ago
Interesting article, but it's a shame that like usual he launches straight off with a fallacious (and extremely boring) strawman argument that what science explains about how the world works is incompatible with any non-naturalist world view...
danbmil99 14y ago
Fucking buzzkill
47uF 14y ago
I don't think this example helps much, because it's not that we don't know what an unpleasant truth feels like. Everyone knows what that feels like. The difference is in what comes next. Do we accept a painful truth or accept a happy lie? To me, rationalists like Sam Harris, and probably most programmers, truth wins over feelings by quite a long shot. A better way to understand the other side, is to realize that for a lot of people this isn't the case. Here's a better example. If you were being cheated on, but this had no affect on your otherwise perfect relationship, would you want to know? What if it was a one time thing that your partner was extremely regretful about and would never happen again. What if you're in your tenth year of the relationship, the cheating occurred nine years ago, you currently share a mortgage and two children. I would still answer yes, and you probably did too. But many people don't care about truth that much. And I don't necessarily think they should.
- DanBC 14y ago
  > and probably most programmers, truth wins over feelings by quite a long shot. You only have to read any HN thread about nutrition to see that idiotic woo is entrenched in a sizeable portion of HN commenters.
  - Nursie 14y ago
    Yup, or pharmaceuticals or a variety of other topics. Programmers and engineers are not a bastion of rationality, no matter how much we like to think we are.
    - 47uF 14y ago
      I'm not saying programmers are always right or rational. I'm saying they care more about truth and logical consistency. Or at least they care more about being the kind of person that cares about truth and logical consistency. Let's say there was a box containing a piece of paper that has the answer to the question, "Does God exist?" or "Is my view on nutrition or pharmaceuticals correct?". The atheist and the programmer would almost certainly look inside that box even at considerable cost. Many religious people would not. Some people could save a lot of time if they realized that.
gizzlon 14y ago
I'm fighting my instinct to refute the fireplace argument in order to get to the more important question. Feel the author is missing the last, important piece: To what degree is this affecting himself? How many beliefs does he hold, against seemingly rational arguments? (None? I wouldn't believe that for a second)
farinasa 14y ago
I understand the metaphor, but my problem with it is that there are many fireplace designs that reburn the smoke. Rocket mass heaters, gasifiers, even catalytic converters combust the smoke which quadruples the heat yield from wood and produces only CO2 and H2O. The lesson I end up taking away is that intelligence can be applied rationally to fix whatever the problem is.
raverbashing 14y ago
Well, good thing they found that out Humanity couldn't possibly live hundreds of years with that harmful heating method. Oh my god, it even produces greenhouse gases. Also, I always laugh at the "equivalent to X cigarettes", always blurted out as a scientific comparison. First of all, even cigarettes are different amongst themselves it's pointless to compare Second, comparable to what? Nicotine? Wood doesn't have any. Carbon monoxide? Tar? Sulphur emissions? Not to mention different substances spread differently.
kgc 14y ago
Well, guess I'm not burning wood anymore.
ypeterholmes 14y ago
This is at the top of hacker news? Yikes.
manmal 14y ago
Related: I recently found out that coffee contains cancerogenic substances. Still, people advertise it as healthy because of its antioxidants. And, the stats seem to suggest that it's actually good for brain health etc. (too lazy to search for references now)
- antiterra 14y ago
  Roasting, grilling and baking regularly creates carcinogens and substances that are likely carcinogens in the food we eat. Currently the link between something like eating bread and actual cancer risk is tenuous, but research is ongoing: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cooked-meats http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cooked-mea... http://sciencenordic.com/renewed-worries-over-carcinogens-foods http://sciencenordic.com/renewed-worries-over-carcinogens-fo...
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
This. Paeleo this. Hey look something humans have always done. It kills people? But it's comforting?
tzaman 14y ago
His facts are right, but his view on this is way too narrow; First there is the social factor. I live in the countryside and every season we build fires for different purposes, like celebration and preparing different vegetables (in Slovenia, corn and potato being the most popular ones). It's fun for everyone, regardless of being dangerous. A lof of people gather around the fire and chat, prepare the food and connect. If I die younger because I wanted to meet with people and have fun,... well so be it. Second reason: nature. The author explains that we have evolved, that we're no longer running from lions and bears. That's true but what about volcanoes (and other natural sources of fire)? The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted 250 million cubic meters of ash (According to Wikipeda), and there are more active volcanoes, releasing loads of toxins into the air on a daily basis. I'm not a scientist but I think it would take A LOT of wood burning to produce a similar amount of toxins. As I said, his facts are right, but there is more to it. Much more.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Indeed, I feel like Sam has failed to take into account the full range of tolerance to clear danger. For example, despite growing up in a public school with a DARE program that stressed the risks, I still drink alcohol at levels that will ultimately be detrimental to my health. I fully understand this risk and, with no cognative dissonance, accept it.
mhax 14y ago
I wonder if these stats hold up when looking at modern stoves (which have burning efficiencies upwards of 70%). Bundling open fires, which are highly inefficient along with these stoves seems a little unreasonable. Lots of modern stoves, in the UK at least, come with defra ( http://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/ http://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/) exemption, meaning they can be used in smoke controlled (i.e. built up urban) areas. These controls are more to do with air pollution, rather than direct human harm, but the two measures must be somewhat correlated.
killermonkeys 14y ago
I have a friend who uses a wood burning stove to heat his home. This article is so long on claims and insults and so short on facts and references that I would never show it to him if I wanted him to change his behavior. The only reference is behind a paywall. If you want to insult two populations (religious people and fire burners) under the assertion that science tells them they are stupid, at least have the sense to include good public references. At least then you can show the facts are indeed on your side.
- ygra 14y ago
  Google Scholar to the rescue: http://www.uvm.edu/~susagctr/Documents/Woodsmoke.pdf http://www.uvm.edu/~susagctr/Documents/Woodsmoke.pdf Cute last page in Comic Sans, too ;-)
  - eloisant 14y ago
    It's funny that the article is hidden behind a paywall, but when you get to it and read it you realize it doesn't support the author views at all: "we conclude that although there is a large and growing body of evidence linking exposure to wood/biomass smoke itself with both acute and chronic illness, there is insufﬁcient evidence at present to support regulating it separately from its individual components, especially ﬁne particulate matter. In addition, there is insufﬁcient evidence at present to conclude that woodsmoke particles are signiﬁcantly less or more damaging to health than general ambient ﬁne particles." That's a good lesson about science: just because an article has serious references doesn't mean it's not bullshit. Don't take the facts for granted if you don't actually read the references.
    - ygra 14y ago
      That's one thing I miss from most, if not all, journalism: Cited sources for the claims in the article. Mind you, academia produces a lot of crap, but at least you can usually verify whether it's crap or not by following the sources. Articles in newspapers and magazines usually don't tell where they got the data and in online publications they often don't even put up useful links.
ghshephard 14y ago
I'm listening to an NPR podcast on thus exact topic. Wood burning stoves are particularly dangerous where there are inversions, but not so much in areas that have good air supply. The air quality impact of the particulates from fireplaces and wood burning stoves is measured by the EPS, and is unhealthy in places like Fairbanks, alaska. With all that said, in some places (Fairbanks) wood stoves are the most effective way of keeping warm, even for people who have oil furnaces.
Xcelerate 14y ago
Curiously, as someone who is religious, I read his article and thought after a couple of arguments "Huh, I guess burning wood is dangerous. Won't be using a fireplace anytime soon". Now, I didn't bother to check any of his facts myself, but I'm confident he probably got them correct. I guess my point is that, despite what he seems to assume, not all religious people debate on the basis of "feelings" or "emotions". My belief is the product of many years of debating with myself what the most reasonable explanation for existence is, and my conclusion was God. I'm not going to list my reasons or get into a debate on HN about it, because my point is simply this: it is possible for two rational people to come to different conclusions without the influence of emotions or personal bias.
- Udo 14y ago
  The point is, it's possible for the same person to be rational about one thing, and irrational about another. In your case, the willingness to accept the health dangers of fireplaces cannot be used to meaningfully demonstrate that your belief in the supernatural must be rational. I think you're right though that irrationality is not necessarily rooted in emotion. There are probably multiple reasons why sometimes malicious memes thrive in brains and no single brain is immune to all of them. That's the price we pay for being cultural and communicative beings. Personally, I think fireplaces are nice, not as a heat source but recreationally. But I know it's irrational ;-)
- sold 14y ago
  > it is possible for two rational people to come to different conclusions without the influence of emotions or personal bias. Aumann's agreement theorem [1] states this is not the case. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann_agreement_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann_agreement_theorem
  - fnayr 14y ago
    Except that that theory requires common knowledge, which certainly is not a correct assumption. What exactly is common knowledge is almost entirely the debate between religion and science.
  - 14y ago
Nursie 14y ago
I'm not sure how this maps to religion. Why would I refuse to believe wood smoke is harmful? I might refuse to stop burning the stuff, but present me with facts and I'll take them on board. I might even switch to a smokeless fuel or cut down how often I burn things. And none of this changes the base enjoyment of a wood fire, or addresses that one might acknowledge how harmful it is but indulge once in a while anyway. Unlike religions, where very, very few would ever acknowledging that the central premise is wrong but then carry on with the charade.
ableal 14y ago
The wood smoke impact was news to me, and I love fireplaces. (Fortunately, so it seems, I rarely get to enjoy them ...) But this last bit got me thinking: "And that should give you some sense of what we are up against whenever we confront religion." Which reminded me of a previous diatribe by the same writer. Just as a gedankenexperiment, I'd like to know what would he do if a scientific study proved that religion was better for public health ...
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  Proving a religion has an effect on health would not change the fact that religion makes unfalsifiable claims. It would not change the fact that religion wants people to believe things without evidence (faith).
1123581321 14y ago
I thought the meta experiment in this article was interesting as I am religious and resented being compared to those who think wood fuel is clean. I would like to find a way to explain to the author that he is the analogous romantic defender of wood burning, but as he says, getting through the incredulity and irrationality is difficult.
maggit 14y ago
> Burning wood is also completely unnecessary, because in the developed world we invariably have better and cleaner alternatives for heating our homes. This assumption seems to be at the center of his argument (about the fireplace, not the analogy-part). However, in my modern apartment here in Norway it is regularly so cold that I am unable to heat it properly without using my wood-burning stove. So it is not recreational. With regards to environmental impact, Norway is no stranger to legislation and have mandated that all new stoves are catalytic [1] since 1998. I am not sure how this impacts the findings referenced in the article, but I am sure that this is one of the possible things to consider other than "ban everything" or "legislate nothing". In conclusion: Of course smoke is bad for you. Bad air quality is a big problem in winter in my town. But I need the heat! [1]: Or "clean burn". Unsure about the English nomenclature here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-burning_stove#Catalytic_and_non-catalytic_stoves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-burning_stove#Catalytic_an...
- yen223 14y ago
  Is natural gas not available in Norway?
  - maggit 14y ago
    In general, no, natural gas is not part of our infrastructure and people don't use it for heating. This has to do with our easy access to hydroelectric power.
  - eloisant 14y ago
    I don't know about US, but in Europe we have modern woodstoves like this maker: http://www.hase.eu/ http://www.hase.eu/ Well installed, they burn almost everything, leaving only mineral parts of the wood. That means more energy-efficient burning, and less smoke. In addition since they're completely close all the smoke goes through the chimney, nothing gets in the house. Correctly used, you get almost no smoke (because everything burns). The only reason a recent woodstove would produce a visible amount of smoke is if you burn stuff you're not supposed to burn (some people use their chimney/woodstove as a garbage bin) or if you burn wet wood. So even when other energies are available, it's a pretty good way to heat your house: cheap, efficient, nice warm feeling, limited pollution.
OGinparadise 14y ago
Now on topic :) So wood burning is bad, and it makes sense. But I have to heat myself with something and that thing is probably coming from coal, gas or nuclear. Is coal any better for the average person or maybe some hit the jackpot and the plant is far away from you? On nuclear it's OK, until it happens, ala Fukushima.
- yen223 14y ago
  I believe coal burns more cleanly than wood. I could be wrong though.
  - eloisant 14y ago
    It depends how you burn your wood. If you burn it in a fireplace you'll reject a lot of smoke (aka unburned particles) but if you burn it in a modern woodstove, wood can burn pretty cleanly.
fduran 14y ago
Also the traditional fireplace cools down the rest of the house.
Millennium 14y ago
While I appreciate that Hacker News and Reddit have a historical relationship, they're still different sites. This really isn't an appropriate forum for this sort of thing.
- edtechdev 14y ago
  I don't mind it being posted, but I am surprised there haven't been any other comments that try to tie it back to hackernews related topics. Every professional field seems to have its share of delusions and resists data to the contrary - programming, academia, technology, entrepreneurship, etc. Some delusions cause more damage than others. Some are harder to refute with data. Baseball scouts had their own beliefs about evaluating players, and the sabermetrics stuff (along with the results of teams like the A's that used it) at least showed them how they could improve things with more data. I'd give examples of delusions vs. data related to hackernews topics, but ah, no thanks, because hackernews is more like reddit and every other large scale public forum than you think.
sarabellumac 14y ago
go push your religion and political views someplace else
JulianMorrison 14y ago
It made me sad, but it also immediately made me change my behaviour - I'll regard wood smoke as a harmful indulgence if I enjoy it myself, and not to be foisted upon neighbors or kids.
dylangs1030 14y ago
I must be a serial contrarian, because I actually can't get enough of facts like these. I have no internal resistance whatsoever - I've already decided not to get a house with a wood burning fireplace in my next move. I'm sure most people on Hacker News are capable of accepting things like this without having a "religious" reaction.
- dwiel 14y ago
  That, or you hold a different set of beliefs dear than the typical person. I'm not saying this is true about you, just that it is another possibility.
mattangriffel 14y ago
As a philosophy major you realize that not enough people are trained in logic for you to have a reasonable, well-thought out and coherent debate about a topic. Arguments with people who believe something dogmatically end up going in circles and being frustrating for both sides, with neither one ending up making clear progress. At the same time, it's made me question whether "logic" is really something so natural and part of the world itself, if you have to be trained for years in order to understand and argue by its rules..
- rokhayakebe 14y ago
  I feel one could have a great discussion about every single line of your comment. Apparently up to around 200 years ago, or possibly less than that, you learned grammar, rhetoric, and logic in secondary school. Blame the school system for that, Mortimer Adler has a great book on that: "How to read." Debate is the wrong word, Dialectic is the correct one. I think, the usage of the former instead of the second has shaped western thinking for the past few hundred years, and unfortunately the world is never going to recover from that. Imagine if every discussion started with "let us attempt to discover the truth," as opposed to "let us each try to convince the other of our individual truths." The funny thing about dogmatic belief, is that even scientist are dogmatic, even philosophers themselves are, in a sense dogmatic because, well, many believe it all comes down to reasoning. For example you sound convinced in order to have a a coherent debate, one must be trained in logic. Is that a fact? Not to say I disagree, I am just pointing we may all be suffering from the same illness. Is logic natural and part of the world itself, if you must be trained...? That's tough and interesting one. I'll think about this in my free time. It must depend on what you believe. Are only the things that consist of matter natural? Is logic something that hails from matter? I don't know, Lucretius would probably say yes. But you cannot deny its existence since we are speaking of it, so it must be part of this world. Then again, are there things which are part of this world but not natural? I have no freaking clue man. But interesting anyways. However note that logic has existed for years and possibly started before humans with the very first deduction a living entity made. If you ever reasoned then it must be logic, even if faulty reasoning. I think the difference is that some think logic started with Plato because he was the first (at least according to Western History) to record it. But obviously logic was there before, otherwise how would he have noticed it in Socrates.
jtheory 14y ago
This was interesting to read, though I wonder why the author gets so many negative reactions when talking about wood fires... do so many people actually have fireplaces nowadays? Personally, I want more details... most of all because I switched from heating my home with oil to heating it with a wood-pellet stove several years ago, and while I was convinced at the time, I've had my doubts about how it really stacks up as an ecological/renewable/etc. solution. Note this isn't the same as a regular woodstove (it's far more efficient) but I'm sure much of the problems in the OP apply to it... I just need to find out more, and how to balance it against other ways to heat the house.
JDGM 14y ago
I was so sure the final paragraph would be a "gotcha", revealing that everything he had said about wood burning was fabricated specifically to make people experience the sense of resistance he wanted them to.
ScottWhigham 14y ago
The comments here show why we need to be able to collapse/expand comments. Top comment - gun policy explosion. I don't want to even bother with it. However, for me to skip it, I have to scroll sixteen times to see the next-most-voted top-level comment.
snake_plissken 14y ago
Implying every facet of life has to be rooted in some scientific fact or some 98% confidence interval is just as delusional.
nsxwolf 14y ago
There's another view: Who cares? I like fireplaces and I'm fine with the supposed risks, so go F yourself Sam. Some people don't want their lives calibrated and micromanaged by statisticians and scientists and asshats like Sam Harris.
- baudehlo 14y ago
  Whoosh. Perhaps you should re-read the start of the article. It's about how atheists don't understand how the religious feel when you attack their religion with logic. Clearly you just felt attacked - well that's what he was trying to make you feel.
  - nsxwolf 14y ago
    I said I acknowledge that woodsmoke is harmful and that I don't care. I don't hold a cherished belief that woodsmoke is harmless. I do feel that my personal liberty is under attack when people like Sam Harris are out there, advocating that my life be regulated into a sterile, one size fits all dystopian nightmare of his own design.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      The article is not about woodsmoke. The article is about how people react when you attack something. The article uses woodsmoke as an example, presenting many scientific reasons why woodsmoke is bad, and allowing some of the audience to experience the feelings that people have when something they like is attacked. The comments in this thread show that it's a poorly written article and that most people didn't get that point. (Or were not interested in addressing that point.)
      - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
        But the verity of the argument WRT woodsmoke speaks to the strength of the analogy. Many here appear to agree that burning of woodsmoke is not always bad [appeal to majority!] and that the article appears# to go far beyond what there is evidence for in claiming wood burning is wrong, period. [of course that doesn't mean it isn't wrong] Following the analogy to a conclusion on this basis says that those who appeal to scientific arguments for atheism are using poor data and over-reaching often attacking practices which don't match well with real life. If the woodsmoke argument is poor but the analogy is sound then the conclusion is that those who light wood-fires like those who are religious are justified in rejecting this sort of "scientific position". He's done for the anti-woodsmoke position what proving the pope is fallible does for atheism. - - - # I only read the snippets of the conclusions of the papers in the comments and not the actual papers.

322 points by uvdiv 14y ago

uvdiv 14y ago

Here's a free PDF of the toxicology paper he cites: "Woodsmoke Health Effects: A Review" http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/publications/2006%20pubs/JIT%20Woodsmoke2.pdf http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/publications/2006%20pubs... (update): More supporting references here (he should have linked this one): http://www.epa.gov/burnwise/pdfs/woodsmoke_health_effects_jan07.pdf http://www.epa.gov/burnwise/pdfs/woodsmoke_health_effects_ja...

anemic 14y ago
I tried to look where the claim "Research shows that nearly 70 percent of chimney smoke reenters nearby buildings." comes from as I find it interesting. In the "woodsmoke health effects" paper it references this: Pierson, W. E., Koenig, J. Q., and Bardana, E. J., 1989. Potential adverse health effects of wood smoke. West J. Med. 151: 339-342. which is found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1026893/pdf/westjmed00121-0093.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1026893/pdf/west... And it says: > Also, about 70% of the outdoor wood smoke reenters the house (T. V. Larson, PhD, University of Washington, Department of Civil Engineering, unpublished data). First, the article is from 1989 and it's not known when the T.V. Larsons data is collected. Also wouldn't for example the density of the houses or the type of the houses and their ventilation and filtering affect this result? How much? Secondly somehow the original article mentions that the smoke reenters the house, which I understand is the same house with the stove/fireplace, but in the "woodsmoke health effects" paper it has transformed to "can actually reenter the home and neighborhood dwellings"?

tomjen3 14y ago

Seems well argued. But we will never be able to ban stoves, fireplaces, etc.

Adaptive 14y ago
Maybe not ban, nor would we want to, but carbon credits could come into play and impact selection of home heating options, for example.
- ars 14y ago
  I assume you mean carbon dioxide credits, not carbon credits. Because for fireplaces it would have to be actual carbon credits - fireplaces release lots of carbon into the air as pollution. Incidentally people should stop being lazy and say carbon dioxide when they mean carbon dioxide - otherwise it gets confusing in situations like this where fireplaces release both carbon dioxide, and carbon, into the air.
  - Adaptive 14y ago
    I specifically meant carbon credits. E.g. price of, for example, wood burning stoves could build in a fee/tax charged to manufacturers or importers given the nature of the product. It's not just the air pollution, it's also cutting down trees, though at least when we cut it was usually clearing farm land. As for existing fireplaces/stoves, I suppose a tax could be levied if they are the primary heat source. There are already lots of incentive based energy efficiency city and statewide programs around the nation that factor in heating method (and a lot of people eyeing the carbon credit "mining" in that case as well).
    - ghaff 14y ago
      It may be expired now, but a couple of years ago there was actually a tax credit for putting in a wood stove.
  - eloisant 14y ago
    You're actually thinking about carbon dioxide (CO2) and carbon monoxide (CO). Carbon is just the atom (C), and both carbon CO2 and CO are carbon-based molecules.
    - ars 14y ago
MarkSweep 14y ago
Actually one city in silicon valley has already banned building new wood-burning fireplaces: http://www.losaltosonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12240&Itemid=46 http://www.losaltosonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&#...
myelin 14y ago
My hometown in New Zealand has been working to ban open fires for over a decade, due to their contribution to the city's terrible winter-time air quality. (Not helped by a temperature inversion that causes the smoke to stay near the ground rather than rise and blow away.)
VLM 14y ago
Where I live insurance is hyper-regulated and required if you have a mortgage, and I'm not sure exactly how much or how little social engineering input the EPA had, but you're looking at your home insurance bill going up by about $2000 annually if you have a wood burner of any type in your house. Note this isn't silicon valley, and the national median household income is almost exactly $50K, so for more than half the homes in america, you're talking about a "tax" in excess of 4% of gross income merely for the privilege of owning a woodburner. A tax by any other name... Add to that the cost of obtaining wood, and the substantial mostly product liability costs of a decent wood stove (more than a grand or two) and you've changed owning a woodburner from something any joe 6 pack can have in his house to pretty much elites only. Sure, technically there's no official ban, but spending 5% of my annual income is kinda extreme as a hobby..
- eloisant 14y ago
  In France there is no premium on insurance if you have a fireplace or stove, but you have to declare it, keep it to the norms and do the mandatory yearly check by a professional.

sawyer 14y ago

Great example of how to make seculars feel like religious people when confronted with science; and actually quite educational! I had no idea wood smoke was harmful, but am now glad the fireplace in my living room is gas, heh.

rimantas 14y ago
This is very very bad example. We do know thas some things are bad for us but still are willing to risk anyway. Alcohol, tobacco? I did not think much about how dangerous smoke is but it is no surprise that it is no good (smoke is particles, it cannot be good anyway). That won't stop me from enjoying a few evenings by bonfire each year. Author chose really bad analogy there and had to stretch it beyond of the breaking point.

Adaptive 14y ago

Refusing to "believe" that fireplaces is bad is simply indulgent and intellectually lazy. I grew up felling trees, cutting wood and burning it all winter long. Yet my fellow bleeding heart environmentalist friends and I have no trouble identifying what a horror wood burning is now. Sam needs new friends.

lukifer 14y ago

Anecdotally, this seems right to me; anytime I use the fireplace, I wake up with a cough the next morning. The framing device of belief systems is interesting. My reaction was to immediately accept his statements as highly probable, but also accept that for now, I'll keep using the fireplace anyway, although maybe less often. But I've no doubt that many self-proclaimed rationalists would jump backflips to maintain what they want to be true. The more I observe human behavior, the more it seems that religious belief is the norm, not the exception. Believers and non-believers alike cement ideas in their head which are indifferent to reality and hard to dislodge. Sometimes this is due to social bonds, or low-level emotional associations, or a support structure for identity/ego; often, it's just plain habit. Nobody likes to feel the rug pulled out from under them. (Okay: I like it just a little.)

kbenson 14y ago
> Nobody likes to feel the rug pulled out from under them. (Okay: I like it just a little.) Me too. Although I find it dependent on what rug I'm standing on. I have a feeling it depends on how core that belief is to how I base my personality and life decisions. In short, it probably breaks down to the amount of time I have invested into it. (If I've recently adopted some belief, I imagine it's easier to accept change or even invalidation than if I spent 20 years with it).
kijin 14y ago
> Believers and non-believers alike cement ideas in their head which are indifferent to reality and hard to dislodge. When such ideas acquire a (more or less) self-consistent philosophical theory to back them up, and social institutions to promote them, that's what most people call religion. Sometimes we also call them ideologies or traditions. Some have supernatural elements and some don't, but their cognitive and social functions seem to be mostly the same.
svantana 14y ago
I am one of those few people who enjoy having my beliefs being disproven - and I guess there are plenty of us here on HN. Most likely people with this predisposition are drawn to science; after all, refuting hypotheses is what science is all about.

nraynaud 14y ago

There is something to be careful of with this new piece of information, this is about accumulation, so don't freak about going to your firend's who as a chimey. It's about everyday smoke. On another level, it reminds us that human are creatures of psychology, this feeling of warms and wood smoke is important, we have to find some other ritual to replace it. Rituals are important to the society.

fmkamchatka 14y ago

I get the point but was is the impact of recreationally burning wood a few evenings in the winter or at a campfire. It seems, even from the article, that the repeated practice is bad but I don't think that at this point it would still be called recreational. It's similar to eating fast food. Every day, the consequences would be disastrous, but once in a blue moon that's a different story.

juice13 14y ago

Please stop making sane arguments. They cause me to think, and that's not good now is it?

Jach 14y ago

So I accept they're bad for me and my neighbors--how bad, roughly? I like wood fires, and intend to keep lighting them with about the same frequency as now (every 6-18 months or so), but is this going to take a year off my/my neighbors' life expectancy? Just like driving has a pretty high chance of death, I suspect it's "worth it" when the utilities come out. (Edit: Or as fmkamchatka mentioned in a better example, eating fast food every now and again.)

meric 14y ago
If burning a fire once is equal to taking 30 cigarettes, then I suppose taking 30 cigarettes every 6-18 months isn't that bad, in the big scheme of things.

clhodapp 14y ago

Honestly, I find myself easily convinced that burning wood is hazardous, though I do note that it is not something most people do all the time (nor is it addictive).

cmdli 14y ago

The overall point seems to be true, but that may just be because of previously held beliefs which I would like to confirm (much like the author suggests with fireplaces). I think people have a hard time accepting scientific fact because the reality of the situation is much more convincing. Many people live with fireplaces, so their reality is that they are not harmful, regardless of the science behind the hazard they pose. It's much like American football: so many people have either played it or know people that play it that the possibility of damage due to injuries seems unreal or at least acceptable to them, because they haven't seen the harm in their experience. Speaking from a personal viewpoint, I find that many rationalists put little value in peoples' opinions because they are "unsupported", ignoring the mountain of personal, anecdoctal evidence that the person has gained over their life, which is much more likely to be believed than the foreign research of far-off scientists.

Nursie 14y ago
"Many people live with fireplaces, so their reality is that they are not harmful" That's not reality though is it? And it could be compared to smoking - the reality is that it's very harmful, but for a very long time nobody really believed that. "I find that many rationalists put little value in peoples' opinions because they are "unsupported", ignoring the mountain of personal, anecdoctal evidence that the person has gained over their life, which is much more likely to be believed than the foreign research of far-off scientists." That's because in the modern world we know that there is actually little value to these things compared to a dispassionate analysis. I understand that this is why many people are slow to 'believe' research when it confronts their ideas though.

ishener 14y ago

Excellent example of how something that is natural and have been around for tens of thousands of years is worse than other artificial things that are manufactured in factories.

kijin 14y ago

I'm not sure if this is meant to be an attack on fireplaces that uses an analogy with religion, or an attack on religion that uses an analogy with fireplaces. Maybe it's both. In any case, I find the analogy rather distracting. All those paragraphs could have been better spent on comparing the energy efficiency and polluting effect of fireplaces with those of other methods of heating, and similar information. The danger of air pollution from fireplaces (in addition to the obvious implications on CO2 production) is an interesting and important topic on its own. There is no need to give the article an extra "edge" by dragging in the issue of religion vs. science -- which we already know Sam Harris is obsessed with. And he's really beginning to sound like an Emeritus professor who talks on and on about his pet theory in the Q&A session of everyone else's colloquium, whether it's related or not. Harris, Dawkins, etc. are very smart people, and they could do a lot of good in the world by doing their best to purge biases, politics and superstition of all kinds from undeniable facts. But I often feel that their pursuit of controversy for the sake of controversy actually does a disservice to human rationality. Burning wood is bad for the environment, and here are the numbers that say so, so let's stop doing it. Is it really so difficult to get that message across without adding any unnecessary politics to it? Disclaimer: I came from a country where real fireplaces are rare items that you only occasionally see in upscale coffee shops, which is probably why I find it easy to believe that they are indeed nasty things.

fishtoaster 14y ago
I think you missed the point a bit: the article was about scientific/religious discussion. The author was trying to make the reader (presumably an atheist and/or skeptic) feel the same emotional response that the religious feel when their beliefs are challenged. The whole woodsmoke thing was just an illustrative discussion: most people reading it will feel an instinctive negative reaction against having something they cherish so attacked, even with solid evidence. So, it's neither an attack on fireplaces or religion: it's an attempt to make skeptics empathize a bit with those they're trying to convince.
- kijin 14y ago
  Thanks, I was probably approaching the article with the wrong expectations, leading to disappointment.

eitland 14y ago

Anyone wants to make a thread here on the long and the short carbon cycle? (The small being trees, animals etc growing old, rot, release the carbon, the long being trees, animals etc growing old, getting sealed under layers of soil and finally converted to coal or oil/gas?) Not meaning to take anything away from the toxicologi part but in a whole lot of places wood is still an energy source and would need to be replaced. Where I live we use (hydroelectric mostly) electricity for heating mostly which seems liek a genuine waste of high value electricity.

tadfisher 14y ago
You're right in that wood-burning is carbon-neutral over human lifespans, making it far better than, say, coal-burning power plants in terms of emissions. However, in the short term, wood-burning is problematic much like smog from driving is problematic. If cars burned nothing but renewable vegetable oil, and drive in places like Los Angeles the same amount that people drive today, smog would still be a problem for human health. I think the article overstates the risk a bit; high-efficiency wood stoves burn off much of the harmful gas and particulates and don't have visible emissions when they are working properly, for example. But that's not the point of the article.

hzay 14y ago

Firstly, none of my wood-burning-loving-friends would refuse to accept the truthiness of the wood-burning-is-bad theory after they look into the sources. They'd do the same of any other argument that interests them. I guess I'm luckier than the author is with respect to the openness of our friends. Secondly, when he says that the resistance you feel to new ideas is itself bad, I detect a suggestion that you ought to be less questioning than usual when someone claims something as "science", especially if it goes against your taste/interests. This is a dangerous suggestion because being an unquestioning science-fanboy is no better than being unquestioningly religious or being an unquestioning brand-fanboy or brand-hateboy. Among a lot of my facebook-friends, it is sacrilegious to suggest that global warming is perhaps not happening. I'm not drawing your attention to the truthiness of that idea but the fact that it is considered unacceptable to be ignorant or misinformed about that topic - you are instantly understood to be "unscientific" if you question it. OTOH, it is completely okay to be ignorant or misinformed about say, the runtime complexity of dijkstra's - you just "didn't know" and it can be explained to you. Thirdly, I didn't get the wood-burning thing at all because we don't have fireplaces in south india. At least I've never seen one here. Obviously I don't mean that you shouldn't talk about fireplaces but I wish more people and magazines realized that their readership is no longer purely american. I distinctly remember a statement by NASA a few years ago that said that nobody needs to worry about this upcoming meteor because there won't be any harm caused to anyone, everything is fine, there's an insignificantly tiny chance that it would hit north america. I know NASA is funded by the US govt. and all that but by now a lot of people in a lot of countries look to them as the forerunner in space research and I wish they'd realize that.

uvdiv 14y ago
Thirdly, I didn't get the wood-burning thing at all because we don't have fireplaces in south india. Aren't wood-burning stoves pretty common? Like these, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_India#Fuel_wood_and_biomass_burning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_India#Fuel_wo...
- test001only 14y ago
  Exactly what I was going to say. Wood burning stoves are very common especially in villages and also among poor people as wood is more widely available and is cheaper than LPG. We ourself have wood burning stove as an alternate to the LPG stove because cooking in slow fire on a stone or iron vessel is considered to produce tastier and healthier food. I understood that wood smoke was harmful but that it contains carcinogens is new for me.

nostromo 14y ago

Discussing gun policy with a friend, I mentioned the Freakonomics statistic that having a pool on your property is 100 times more dangerous for your child's welfare than having a gun in the house. If you really want to see a certain subset of your friends squirm with cognitive dissonance, mention this. (I hope this doesn't start a flame war. The reason I bring up this particular example is because guns seem so ridiculously evil, while having a pool seems like every child's dream, yet the numbers tell a very different story in terms of perceived vs. actual danger.) Edit: I regret posting this; but I won't delete it so people know the context of the replies. Sorry HN!

twiceaday 14y ago
Define dangerous.
- arbus 14y ago
  dangerous as in death by drowning vs death by shooting http://www.freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-5/ http://www.freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excer...
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kkowalczyk 14y ago
The flaw in this argument is that guns and pools have very different uses. You can't swim in a gun. Guns have no useful purpose. The fact that pools are more dangerous doesn't justify owning a gun, so there is no "cognitive dissonance" here. You don't want a gun in your house regardless of any other dangers that exists, just like you want to child proof the house. You want a pool for the same reason you want a bicycle: it provides lots of benefit. Ultimately we make a choice that the benefit of the pool or the benefit of a bicycle for the child is greater than the risk. We can't eliminate all the risk. We can eliminate unnecessary risk (like guns).

oelmekki 14y ago

I understand author is concerned about religious people hurted feelings, but just to be clear: is the point, here, that we shouldn't rectify obviously wrong people because we are sometime obviously wrong ourselves ? Sounds like a chewbacca defense to me.

kbenson 14y ago
I think he's trying to provide a reference point. "Here's a way that you may behave that is similar to the way you bemoan others behaving." It's my believe that reference points help further useful discussion, so I think this is a good thing.
- oelmekki 14y ago
  I totally subscribe to this vision. I just would have read it more clearly in the article, that's kind of ambiguous, like : "1°) religious people are hurted when you argue with them, 2°) here is what you would feel in their place". Conclusion could be as well "stop arguing with religious people, you're wrong too" as "don't push their feeling too hard and have some compassion when explaining your arguments" :)

nnq 14y ago

The comparison is very bad: something like burning wood gives you small psychological comfort but no benefit, while something like religion brings quite a lot of benefits for a large segment of scientifically illiterate or psychologically "unstable" people (and besides basic school knowledge of science, most people are quite "illiterate" unfortunately, they lack the most important parts of experiment based reasoning, the skills to build clear and falsifiable hypotheses, a "true" understanding of evolution and why it works and so on...). Also, to make wood burning unnecessary, you only have to give people access to electric or gas heating, and after this only a few nostalgics will occasionally burn wood for "recreation". To make religion unnecessary, you'd need to educate people to quite a high level (scientific knowledge and reason can only replace religion once somebody gains quite a deep and intuitive understanding of both) and you'd also need to have a "socially healthy" society that promotes "healthy" relations among people (a completely unsolved problem imho, although we like to think otherwise!), replacing part of the socio-moral function of religion (basing morality on religion, you get an ugly but working system of "no-think ethics" that has a lot of bugs but works on "all platforms", not matter how irrational they may be). It's much harder to bring people to a high enough level of education, psychological health and "social health" than to just give them central heating. Religion is quite an ugly hack, but it solves quite a bunch of problems for quite a lot of people, although these are mostly "hard to measure" problems.

Tichy 14y ago
"after this only a few nostalgics will occasionally burn wood for "recreation"" Not true unfortunately - here in Germany wood burning has been trending in recent years, even though alternative means of heating are readily available. In fact most house owners probably equip both - gas/oil heating for the baseline comfort and wood for the coziness.
- BudVVeezer 14y ago
  Same is true in parts of the US as well. Here in Maine, it costs 3.80$/gal for heating oil, but you can get wood for 100$/cord. This means I can heat my house with oil to the tune of about 3k/year, or wood for 400/year.

kkowalczyk 14y ago

Looks like very flawed analogy to me. It's one thing to believe in something when there is no rational reason for the belief (religion). It's completely different to not believe something just because someone says so. I don't know if burning wood is as harmful as the article says. Prior to reading it I had no data and if I were asked, I would indeed think that it's safe given that people were doing it since the dawn of human race and no one drops dead because they sat near fire. If a random smart aleck accosted me at a party and started telling me how it's sooo bad (which seems to be the article's author MO), I would brush him off, and that would have been a rational reaction. After reading this article I'm inclined to accept that burning wood is dangerous but I'm far from convinced - it's a single data point. The author is clearly so in love with his "clever" analogy that he can't help equating apples to oranges (a skepticism about a claim due to lack of expertise to evaluate whether it's true or false and an active, irrational belief that is internally inconsistent and whose many aspects have been refuted by science and at a level that is comprehensible to regular humans (like finding carbon-dated human remains older than the age of universe according to bible).

rosser 14y ago
I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but you've just made Harris' argument for him. Also, some science for your perusal can be found in uvdiv's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5355300 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5355300
jaggederest 14y ago
> no one drops dead because they sat near fire. Joan of Arc would have a word with you, I'm sure. The old Pratchett quote: "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

tolmasky 14y ago

I feel like I had a slightly different takeaway than the author intended to make: namely, that this is a great example of exactly the wrong way to make an argument. Maybe this was actually what he intended, but I don't think it was. But let me back track a bit. There is a lot to say here about choosing an antagonistic way of presenting an idea, but one tiny nitpick affected me in particular. I was actually following fine and agreeing perfectly well up until his proposed solution of solving everything by simply making a law. Now, the problem isn't necessarily that I don't think this is the best solution, but the fact that he clearly does not actually understand the libertarian position, and thus completely fails to convince me by using the wrong counter arguments to hypothetical objections he imagines I have. His assumption is that libertarians value ridiculous personal freedoms more than the environment, and thus spends his time explaining how much the externalities of wood burning outweigh whatever silly freedom I may be concerned with this week. This is equivalent to patronizing someone who is for drug legalization by explaining to them that, actually, drugs are bad, and that's why they need to be illegal silly. I think he can't fathom that I may actually be 100% in agreement with his goal (to reduce wood burning), and yet reach a completely different conclusion as to the method to achieve it. A big part of the libertarian argument is actually quite consequentialist: make this illegal and you may very well find the the amount of wood burning go up, or at least not decreasing at all. If its obvious to you that that's not the case, then it should be easy to prove. To convince me (and it is totally possible), I'd actually be curious to know things such as: is wood burning already decreasing on its own and thus not require a law and all sorts of strange enforcement practices? Are we sure that enforcing such a law wouldn't unexpectedly require another form of pollution (wouldn't be the first time an environmental law had that result). Have we really exhausted all other approaches including education on the subject? Etc. Etc. I get the sense that what he wants us to walk away with is "look how hard the truth can be to accept if you don't know it", but I think the real takeaway is seeing how little we understand our audience sometimes. Whether the argument is political or religious, the favored method of argumentation seems to be "shock and awe". Showing people that as it turns out, they're actually assholes and didn't even know it! Then following up by belittling their values and explaining why your values are more important. This rarely works. I think people's goals are actually way more aligned than we think they are, but understandably we have reached different conclusions on how to reach those goals (again, the drug legalization issue is a great example). To finally bring it full circle, I think this is certainly true of religious arguments. I'm certain there is a much better path than trying to beat into people's heads how stupid they've actually been their whole lives and how they're partially responsible for so much suffering in the world by perpetuating this "terrible" thing.

jacobolus 14y ago

This is absurdly hyperbolic. Few people are going to die because they made a wood fire in a fireplace 10-20 times a year. The reason wood fires cause serious health problems in the developing world is that they’re put in the center of a one-room house, with no chimney, and used for heating/cooking/etc. The whole room fills with smoke, to the point that eyes sting and it’s hard to breathe, and the smoke noticeably impacts visibility. The density of smoke in such a room is probably at least an order of magnitude greater than in a room with a fireplace and in the corner. Additionally, such houses are filled with wood smoke all day every day of the year. The hearth fire is an essential part of the home. [Source: my parents are anthropologists and I spent a substantial chunk of my childhood hanging out in this kind of home.] That said, I’ll absolutely agree that spending time in such an environment is dramatically more unpleasant than spending time in a room with several heavy smokers, and almost certainly more damaging. Which is why it seems ridiculous that a certain sort of person will both make a big stink about someone smoking nearby outdoors, and also romanticize rural peasant life and wax poetic about how much less toxic life used to be in the past.

gizzlon 14y ago
No chimney? Wtf? :) Where is this?
- coolj 14y ago
  > in the developing world cf. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/22/AR2005052200772.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05...
  - gizzlon 14y ago
    Yeah, I misread your comment as "in the developed world..".. Having felt the effect of "fireplace smoke" without a chimney I find it strange that people live like that. OTOH, African houses are probably much more open than the house I'm used to..
roel_v 14y ago
"This is absurdly hyperbolic. Few people are going to die because they made a wood fire in a fireplace 10-20 times a year." Did you even read the linked papers? There is direct and plausible evidence that recreational wood burning in the West is a significant contributor to pollution in residential areas, with the pollution itself clearly linked to public health. So basically, you're flat out wrong (or arguing a straw man, if I take your comment literally) - yes, dozens of people are going to die each year because of recreational wood burning.

stephen_g 14y ago

Interesting article, but it's a shame that like usual he launches straight off with a fallacious (and extremely boring) strawman argument that what science explains about how the world works is incompatible with any non-naturalist world view...

danbmil99 14y ago

Fucking buzzkill

47uF 14y ago

I don't think this example helps much, because it's not that we don't know what an unpleasant truth feels like. Everyone knows what that feels like. The difference is in what comes next. Do we accept a painful truth or accept a happy lie? To me, rationalists like Sam Harris, and probably most programmers, truth wins over feelings by quite a long shot. A better way to understand the other side, is to realize that for a lot of people this isn't the case. Here's a better example. If you were being cheated on, but this had no affect on your otherwise perfect relationship, would you want to know? What if it was a one time thing that your partner was extremely regretful about and would never happen again. What if you're in your tenth year of the relationship, the cheating occurred nine years ago, you currently share a mortgage and two children. I would still answer yes, and you probably did too. But many people don't care about truth that much. And I don't necessarily think they should.

DanBC 14y ago
> and probably most programmers, truth wins over feelings by quite a long shot. You only have to read any HN thread about nutrition to see that idiotic woo is entrenched in a sizeable portion of HN commenters.
- Nursie 14y ago
  Yup, or pharmaceuticals or a variety of other topics. Programmers and engineers are not a bastion of rationality, no matter how much we like to think we are.
  - 47uF 14y ago
    I'm not saying programmers are always right or rational. I'm saying they care more about truth and logical consistency. Or at least they care more about being the kind of person that cares about truth and logical consistency. Let's say there was a box containing a piece of paper that has the answer to the question, "Does God exist?" or "Is my view on nutrition or pharmaceuticals correct?". The atheist and the programmer would almost certainly look inside that box even at considerable cost. Many religious people would not. Some people could save a lot of time if they realized that.

gizzlon 14y ago

I'm fighting my instinct to refute the fireplace argument in order to get to the more important question. Feel the author is missing the last, important piece: To what degree is this affecting himself? How many beliefs does he hold, against seemingly rational arguments? (None? I wouldn't believe that for a second)

farinasa 14y ago

I understand the metaphor, but my problem with it is that there are many fireplace designs that reburn the smoke. Rocket mass heaters, gasifiers, even catalytic converters combust the smoke which quadruples the heat yield from wood and produces only CO2 and H2O. The lesson I end up taking away is that intelligence can be applied rationally to fix whatever the problem is.

raverbashing 14y ago

Well, good thing they found that out Humanity couldn't possibly live hundreds of years with that harmful heating method. Oh my god, it even produces greenhouse gases. Also, I always laugh at the "equivalent to X cigarettes", always blurted out as a scientific comparison. First of all, even cigarettes are different amongst themselves it's pointless to compare Second, comparable to what? Nicotine? Wood doesn't have any. Carbon monoxide? Tar? Sulphur emissions? Not to mention different substances spread differently.

kgc 14y ago

Well, guess I'm not burning wood anymore.

ypeterholmes 14y ago

This is at the top of hacker news? Yikes.

manmal 14y ago

Related: I recently found out that coffee contains cancerogenic substances. Still, people advertise it as healthy because of its antioxidants. And, the stats seem to suggest that it's actually good for brain health etc. (too lazy to search for references now)

antiterra 14y ago
Roasting, grilling and baking regularly creates carcinogens and substances that are likely carcinogens in the food we eat. Currently the link between something like eating bread and actual cancer risk is tenuous, but research is ongoing: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cooked-meats http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cooked-mea... http://sciencenordic.com/renewed-worries-over-carcinogens-foods http://sciencenordic.com/renewed-worries-over-carcinogens-fo...

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

This. Paeleo this. Hey look something humans have always done. It kills people? But it's comforting?

tzaman 14y ago

His facts are right, but his view on this is way too narrow; First there is the social factor. I live in the countryside and every season we build fires for different purposes, like celebration and preparing different vegetables (in Slovenia, corn and potato being the most popular ones). It's fun for everyone, regardless of being dangerous. A lof of people gather around the fire and chat, prepare the food and connect. If I die younger because I wanted to meet with people and have fun,... well so be it. Second reason: nature. The author explains that we have evolved, that we're no longer running from lions and bears. That's true but what about volcanoes (and other natural sources of fire)? The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted 250 million cubic meters of ash (According to Wikipeda), and there are more active volcanoes, releasing loads of toxins into the air on a daily basis. I'm not a scientist but I think it would take A LOT of wood burning to produce a similar amount of toxins. As I said, his facts are right, but there is more to it. Much more.

jlgreco 14y ago
Indeed, I feel like Sam has failed to take into account the full range of tolerance to clear danger. For example, despite growing up in a public school with a DARE program that stressed the risks, I still drink alcohol at levels that will ultimately be detrimental to my health. I fully understand this risk and, with no cognative dissonance, accept it.

mhax 14y ago

I wonder if these stats hold up when looking at modern stoves (which have burning efficiencies upwards of 70%). Bundling open fires, which are highly inefficient along with these stoves seems a little unreasonable. Lots of modern stoves, in the UK at least, come with defra ( http://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/ http://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/) exemption, meaning they can be used in smoke controlled (i.e. built up urban) areas. These controls are more to do with air pollution, rather than direct human harm, but the two measures must be somewhat correlated.

killermonkeys 14y ago

I have a friend who uses a wood burning stove to heat his home. This article is so long on claims and insults and so short on facts and references that I would never show it to him if I wanted him to change his behavior. The only reference is behind a paywall. If you want to insult two populations (religious people and fire burners) under the assertion that science tells them they are stupid, at least have the sense to include good public references. At least then you can show the facts are indeed on your side.

ygra 14y ago
Google Scholar to the rescue: http://www.uvm.edu/~susagctr/Documents/Woodsmoke.pdf http://www.uvm.edu/~susagctr/Documents/Woodsmoke.pdf Cute last page in Comic Sans, too ;-)
- eloisant 14y ago
  It's funny that the article is hidden behind a paywall, but when you get to it and read it you realize it doesn't support the author views at all: "we conclude that although there is a large and growing body of evidence linking exposure to wood/biomass smoke itself with both acute and chronic illness, there is insufﬁcient evidence at present to support regulating it separately from its individual components, especially ﬁne particulate matter. In addition, there is insufﬁcient evidence at present to conclude that woodsmoke particles are signiﬁcantly less or more damaging to health than general ambient ﬁne particles." That's a good lesson about science: just because an article has serious references doesn't mean it's not bullshit. Don't take the facts for granted if you don't actually read the references.
  - ygra 14y ago
    That's one thing I miss from most, if not all, journalism: Cited sources for the claims in the article. Mind you, academia produces a lot of crap, but at least you can usually verify whether it's crap or not by following the sources. Articles in newspapers and magazines usually don't tell where they got the data and in online publications they often don't even put up useful links.

ghshephard 14y ago

I'm listening to an NPR podcast on thus exact topic. Wood burning stoves are particularly dangerous where there are inversions, but not so much in areas that have good air supply. The air quality impact of the particulates from fireplaces and wood burning stoves is measured by the EPS, and is unhealthy in places like Fairbanks, alaska. With all that said, in some places (Fairbanks) wood stoves are the most effective way of keeping warm, even for people who have oil furnaces.

Xcelerate 14y ago

Curiously, as someone who is religious, I read his article and thought after a couple of arguments "Huh, I guess burning wood is dangerous. Won't be using a fireplace anytime soon". Now, I didn't bother to check any of his facts myself, but I'm confident he probably got them correct. I guess my point is that, despite what he seems to assume, not all religious people debate on the basis of "feelings" or "emotions". My belief is the product of many years of debating with myself what the most reasonable explanation for existence is, and my conclusion was God. I'm not going to list my reasons or get into a debate on HN about it, because my point is simply this: it is possible for two rational people to come to different conclusions without the influence of emotions or personal bias.

Udo 14y ago
The point is, it's possible for the same person to be rational about one thing, and irrational about another. In your case, the willingness to accept the health dangers of fireplaces cannot be used to meaningfully demonstrate that your belief in the supernatural must be rational. I think you're right though that irrationality is not necessarily rooted in emotion. There are probably multiple reasons why sometimes malicious memes thrive in brains and no single brain is immune to all of them. That's the price we pay for being cultural and communicative beings. Personally, I think fireplaces are nice, not as a heat source but recreationally. But I know it's irrational ;-)
sold 14y ago
> it is possible for two rational people to come to different conclusions without the influence of emotions or personal bias. Aumann's agreement theorem [1] states this is not the case. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann_agreement_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann_agreement_theorem
- fnayr 14y ago
  Except that that theory requires common knowledge, which certainly is not a correct assumption. What exactly is common knowledge is almost entirely the debate between religion and science.
- 14y ago

Nursie 14y ago

I'm not sure how this maps to religion. Why would I refuse to believe wood smoke is harmful? I might refuse to stop burning the stuff, but present me with facts and I'll take them on board. I might even switch to a smokeless fuel or cut down how often I burn things. And none of this changes the base enjoyment of a wood fire, or addresses that one might acknowledge how harmful it is but indulge once in a while anyway. Unlike religions, where very, very few would ever acknowledging that the central premise is wrong but then carry on with the charade.

ableal 14y ago

The wood smoke impact was news to me, and I love fireplaces. (Fortunately, so it seems, I rarely get to enjoy them ...) But this last bit got me thinking: "And that should give you some sense of what we are up against whenever we confront religion." Which reminded me of a previous diatribe by the same writer. Just as a gedankenexperiment, I'd like to know what would he do if a scientific study proved that religion was better for public health ...

MichaelGG 14y ago
Proving a religion has an effect on health would not change the fact that religion makes unfalsifiable claims. It would not change the fact that religion wants people to believe things without evidence (faith).

1123581321 14y ago

I thought the meta experiment in this article was interesting as I am religious and resented being compared to those who think wood fuel is clean. I would like to find a way to explain to the author that he is the analogous romantic defender of wood burning, but as he says, getting through the incredulity and irrationality is difficult.

maggit 14y ago

> Burning wood is also completely unnecessary, because in the developed world we invariably have better and cleaner alternatives for heating our homes. This assumption seems to be at the center of his argument (about the fireplace, not the analogy-part). However, in my modern apartment here in Norway it is regularly so cold that I am unable to heat it properly without using my wood-burning stove. So it is not recreational. With regards to environmental impact, Norway is no stranger to legislation and have mandated that all new stoves are catalytic [1] since 1998. I am not sure how this impacts the findings referenced in the article, but I am sure that this is one of the possible things to consider other than "ban everything" or "legislate nothing". In conclusion: Of course smoke is bad for you. Bad air quality is a big problem in winter in my town. But I need the heat! [1]: Or "clean burn". Unsure about the English nomenclature here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-burning_stove#Catalytic_and_non-catalytic_stoves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-burning_stove#Catalytic_an...

yen223 14y ago
Is natural gas not available in Norway?
- maggit 14y ago
  In general, no, natural gas is not part of our infrastructure and people don't use it for heating. This has to do with our easy access to hydroelectric power.
- eloisant 14y ago
  I don't know about US, but in Europe we have modern woodstoves like this maker: http://www.hase.eu/ http://www.hase.eu/ Well installed, they burn almost everything, leaving only mineral parts of the wood. That means more energy-efficient burning, and less smoke. In addition since they're completely close all the smoke goes through the chimney, nothing gets in the house. Correctly used, you get almost no smoke (because everything burns). The only reason a recent woodstove would produce a visible amount of smoke is if you burn stuff you're not supposed to burn (some people use their chimney/woodstove as a garbage bin) or if you burn wet wood. So even when other energies are available, it's a pretty good way to heat your house: cheap, efficient, nice warm feeling, limited pollution.

OGinparadise 14y ago

Now on topic :) So wood burning is bad, and it makes sense. But I have to heat myself with something and that thing is probably coming from coal, gas or nuclear. Is coal any better for the average person or maybe some hit the jackpot and the plant is far away from you? On nuclear it's OK, until it happens, ala Fukushima.

yen223 14y ago
I believe coal burns more cleanly than wood. I could be wrong though.
- eloisant 14y ago
  It depends how you burn your wood. If you burn it in a fireplace you'll reject a lot of smoke (aka unburned particles) but if you burn it in a modern woodstove, wood can burn pretty cleanly.

fduran 14y ago

Also the traditional fireplace cools down the rest of the house.

Millennium 14y ago

While I appreciate that Hacker News and Reddit have a historical relationship, they're still different sites. This really isn't an appropriate forum for this sort of thing.

edtechdev 14y ago
I don't mind it being posted, but I am surprised there haven't been any other comments that try to tie it back to hackernews related topics. Every professional field seems to have its share of delusions and resists data to the contrary - programming, academia, technology, entrepreneurship, etc. Some delusions cause more damage than others. Some are harder to refute with data. Baseball scouts had their own beliefs about evaluating players, and the sabermetrics stuff (along with the results of teams like the A's that used it) at least showed them how they could improve things with more data. I'd give examples of delusions vs. data related to hackernews topics, but ah, no thanks, because hackernews is more like reddit and every other large scale public forum than you think.

sarabellumac 14y ago

go push your religion and political views someplace else

JulianMorrison 14y ago

It made me sad, but it also immediately made me change my behaviour - I'll regard wood smoke as a harmful indulgence if I enjoy it myself, and not to be foisted upon neighbors or kids.

dylangs1030 14y ago

I must be a serial contrarian, because I actually can't get enough of facts like these. I have no internal resistance whatsoever - I've already decided not to get a house with a wood burning fireplace in my next move. I'm sure most people on Hacker News are capable of accepting things like this without having a "religious" reaction.

dwiel 14y ago
That, or you hold a different set of beliefs dear than the typical person. I'm not saying this is true about you, just that it is another possibility.

mattangriffel 14y ago

As a philosophy major you realize that not enough people are trained in logic for you to have a reasonable, well-thought out and coherent debate about a topic. Arguments with people who believe something dogmatically end up going in circles and being frustrating for both sides, with neither one ending up making clear progress. At the same time, it's made me question whether "logic" is really something so natural and part of the world itself, if you have to be trained for years in order to understand and argue by its rules..

rokhayakebe 14y ago
I feel one could have a great discussion about every single line of your comment. Apparently up to around 200 years ago, or possibly less than that, you learned grammar, rhetoric, and logic in secondary school. Blame the school system for that, Mortimer Adler has a great book on that: "How to read." Debate is the wrong word, Dialectic is the correct one. I think, the usage of the former instead of the second has shaped western thinking for the past few hundred years, and unfortunately the world is never going to recover from that. Imagine if every discussion started with "let us attempt to discover the truth," as opposed to "let us each try to convince the other of our individual truths." The funny thing about dogmatic belief, is that even scientist are dogmatic, even philosophers themselves are, in a sense dogmatic because, well, many believe it all comes down to reasoning. For example you sound convinced in order to have a a coherent debate, one must be trained in logic. Is that a fact? Not to say I disagree, I am just pointing we may all be suffering from the same illness. Is logic natural and part of the world itself, if you must be trained...? That's tough and interesting one. I'll think about this in my free time. It must depend on what you believe. Are only the things that consist of matter natural? Is logic something that hails from matter? I don't know, Lucretius would probably say yes. But you cannot deny its existence since we are speaking of it, so it must be part of this world. Then again, are there things which are part of this world but not natural? I have no freaking clue man. But interesting anyways. However note that logic has existed for years and possibly started before humans with the very first deduction a living entity made. If you ever reasoned then it must be logic, even if faulty reasoning. I think the difference is that some think logic started with Plato because he was the first (at least according to Western History) to record it. But obviously logic was there before, otherwise how would he have noticed it in Socrates.

jtheory 14y ago

This was interesting to read, though I wonder why the author gets so many negative reactions when talking about wood fires... do so many people actually have fireplaces nowadays? Personally, I want more details... most of all because I switched from heating my home with oil to heating it with a wood-pellet stove several years ago, and while I was convinced at the time, I've had my doubts about how it really stacks up as an ecological/renewable/etc. solution. Note this isn't the same as a regular woodstove (it's far more efficient) but I'm sure much of the problems in the OP apply to it... I just need to find out more, and how to balance it against other ways to heat the house.

JDGM 14y ago

I was so sure the final paragraph would be a "gotcha", revealing that everything he had said about wood burning was fabricated specifically to make people experience the sense of resistance he wanted them to.

ScottWhigham 14y ago

The comments here show why we need to be able to collapse/expand comments. Top comment - gun policy explosion. I don't want to even bother with it. However, for me to skip it, I have to scroll sixteen times to see the next-most-voted top-level comment.

snake_plissken 14y ago

Implying every facet of life has to be rooted in some scientific fact or some 98% confidence interval is just as delusional.

nsxwolf 14y ago

There's another view: Who cares? I like fireplaces and I'm fine with the supposed risks, so go F yourself Sam. Some people don't want their lives calibrated and micromanaged by statisticians and scientists and asshats like Sam Harris.

baudehlo 14y ago
Whoosh. Perhaps you should re-read the start of the article. It's about how atheists don't understand how the religious feel when you attack their religion with logic. Clearly you just felt attacked - well that's what he was trying to make you feel.
- nsxwolf 14y ago
  I said I acknowledge that woodsmoke is harmful and that I don't care. I don't hold a cherished belief that woodsmoke is harmless. I do feel that my personal liberty is under attack when people like Sam Harris are out there, advocating that my life be regulated into a sterile, one size fits all dystopian nightmare of his own design.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    The article is not about woodsmoke. The article is about how people react when you attack something. The article uses woodsmoke as an example, presenting many scientific reasons why woodsmoke is bad, and allowing some of the audience to experience the feelings that people have when something they like is attacked. The comments in this thread show that it's a poorly written article and that most people didn't get that point. (Or were not interested in addressing that point.)
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      But the verity of the argument WRT woodsmoke speaks to the strength of the analogy. Many here appear to agree that burning of woodsmoke is not always bad [appeal to majority!] and that the article appears# to go far beyond what there is evidence for in claiming wood burning is wrong, period. [of course that doesn't mean it isn't wrong] Following the analogy to a conclusion on this basis says that those who appeal to scientific arguments for atheism are using poor data and over-reaching often attacking practices which don't match well with real life. If the woodsmoke argument is poor but the analogy is sound then the conclusion is that those who light wood-fires like those who are religious are justified in rejecting this sort of "scientific position". He's done for the anti-woodsmoke position what proving the pope is fallible does for atheism. - - - # I only read the snippets of the conclusions of the papers in the comments and not the actual papers.