Comment by kelseyfrog
2 days ago
I’m honestly baffled by how swiftly everyone demonizes cigarettes as the ultimate evil, as if that’s a done deal.
Whenever group-think is this loud, it’s a huge red flag we should crack open the raw data ourselves. Fisher wasn’t some mustache-twirling villain, just a stubborn contrarian pushing against the orthodoxy. And if Big Tobacco slipped him a check, that doesn’t automatically nuke his math.
Correlation hype is easy, real causation proof is hard, and I’d love to see all the data and methodology. We don’t push science forward by chanting from the same hymn book. We do it by asking hard, unpopular questions.
> I’d love to see all the data and methodology
What stops you from looking at it?
The science has been done, and the results are publicly available. You're free to avail yourself of it at your leisure.
I'll bite. The science, as far as I understand it, clearly demonstrates the addictive properties of nicotine and the negative health effects of smoking.
The alternative theory I've heard is that there are secondary benefits to moderate consumption of cigarettes (moderate in this case being three to five per day) due to appetite suppression and creation of a 3rd place accessible during working hours. Some would also suggest that, at least in institutional environments (hospitals, universities, corporate campuses and manufacturing facilities), the food court/cafeteria and the accompanying array of fast food have replaced the cigarette break.
In this view, we haven't really solved any problems. We've just shifted the damage into a form that society finds to be more palatable. What if we could bring back the cigarette break and in the process boost people's community engagement, mental health and significantly reduce the obesity epidemic all in one hrrrm...
Welcome to my favorite PubMed rabbit hole.
TL:DR; The way that most tobacco is produced causes it to contain Polonium-210. Can we at least agree that putting Polonium-210 into the human body is not great?
https://www.google.com/search?q=pubmed+tobacco+polonium
5 replies →
> just a stubborn contrarian pushing against the orthodoxy.
It's not enough to be a contrarian, you also have to be right. Acknowledging that cigarettes are bad isn't "group think", it's an easy consensus because the evidence at every level, scientific, personal is very clear. Just walk up a bunch of stairs with a heavy smoker.
People who constantly act contrarian because they cannot accept that orthodox opinions are, most of the time, established opinion for decent reasons are both annoying and especially these days a blight on public discourse. They don't move science forward (forward progress is by definition only possible if matters are, at some point, actually settled instead of repeated for eternity), they try to get attention by standing out.
And of course companies tend to use these people because they can easily become useful idiots, it's no surprise that there's an entire cottage industry of "heterodox thinkers" these days. The book in the article, Merchants of Doubt, gives some great examples on this in regards to pollution and climate change denial.