51–60 of 400 posts
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Okay, but the studies will still end up in meta-analyses and potentially skew results.
It depends. I haven't looked at them but good meta-analyses have rules for what to include that might preclude those studies. Were there even experiments or just general reviews?
My father has COPD from over 50 years of smoking. I convinced him to switch to vaping and he's been using a Juul for a few years now. Awhile after the switch his primary care physician listened to his lungs and said they sounded a lot better. She said she because the science isn't in "I can't tell you to vape but I can tell you to keep doing what you're doing". Should non-smokers pick up vaping? Probably not. But in…
I have followed the story of e-cigarettes and can only say it's eye opening, its probably very symptomatic to how things are done. It went from innovators and communities to being large enough that the cigarette companies responded by a smear campaign, disinformation and panic, that was then used to regulate in a way that benefited only the cigarette companies. What a transparently corrupt world we live in.
That and the cigarette companies just bought into the industry. Altria (AKA Philip Morris) owns 35% of Juul.
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> Scientism has become the state religion and companies are paying for indulgences. I was unfamiliar with that term and googled it: it's described as " excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques ". I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset. In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government…
I'm not who you replied to, but I've experienced this with some of my friends. Some people believe in science. They don't take the facts and understand them, they just say "Science says this is true. Anyone who disagrees needs to be shouted down." They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus". This is actually the opposite of science. For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know peop…
Almost literally every physicist since Newton has believed that there is some sort of underlying theory which explains gravity. Its hard to imagine how anyone could get the idea that the matter was somehow settled.
I'd love it if you could share more context.
> Pretty much all the articles take the Juul party line that e-cigarettes help convert smokers away from combustible tobacco products, and thus aid public health. Pretty much none of the articles mention that Juul and other vaping companies make their money by attracting countless new people to nicotine addiction. Well maybe it's because Juul bought the journal or maybe the researchers found no correlation between Ju…
Well, nicotine addiction is a debatable topic as nicotine itself is actually not addictive as a compound.
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> Scientism has become the state religion and companies are paying for indulgences. I was unfamiliar with that term and googled it: it's described as " excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques ". I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset. In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government…
I'm not who you replied to, but I've experienced this with some of my friends. Some people believe in science. They don't take the facts and understand them, they just say "Science says this is true. Anyone who disagrees needs to be shouted down." They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus". This is actually the opposite of science. For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know peop…
A suggestion that there may be a yet undiscovered mechanism for gravity isn't useful to science. It's imaginative perhaps, but without a piece of math, or a suggestion for an experiment by which to test it, it's just science fiction. Ideas are cheap.
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Congratulations on your father's change of habit, I hope he continues to recover and has a long life! That aside, the collective balance is: - how many cigarette smokers will switch (benefit) - how many people will start vaping instead of smoking (benefit) - how many people will switch from vaping to smoking (harm) - how many people will start vaping but wouldn't have started smoking (harm) Perhaps someone with exper…
We don’t know that vaping is harmful. It’s addictive, yes, but not necessarily harmful.
I would be surprised to see that inhaling any kind of smoke or non-water aerosol is good for your lungs, so I'd expect at least a minor harmful effect.
This study, for example, claims increased risks for heart disease [1] (disclaimer: I'm not a medical doctor and cannot evaluate its credibility)
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40138-020-00219-0
This seems to be just standard procedure for any company operating in a health related sector. Maybe the scale is different, but any competent regulator would be aware of these types of relationships and should be adjusting for selection bias in their evaluation.
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Then propose another way of getting reliable, robust and explainable guidelines for managing societies? But of course, evidence-based decision making should not be turned into decision-based evidence making; science alone is not a basis for politics.
In your very last sentence there; you summed up what I meant. I don't know why you expect me to come up with a solution on how to manage societies in a comment section.
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I'm not who you replied to, but I've experienced this with some of my friends. Some people believe in science. They don't take the facts and understand them, they just say "Science says this is true. Anyone who disagrees needs to be shouted down." They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus". This is actually the opposite of science. For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know peop…
>For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, You mean Newton's Law of gravity [1]? I'm not sure where you get the idea there are "theories" and "laws" in science and science moves things from one category to the other. The closest I can find is this distinction: "Scientific theories explain why something happens, whereas scientific law describes what happens." [2] By this description,…