Comment by alexwennerberg
5 days ago
> By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
> Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”
Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you. I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view, especially when "interrogating" in this context would mean spending dozens of hours of my life going line-by-line through each reference and trying to understand the context of a field which, frankly speaking, neither me nor the author of the article have any business trying to evaluate. The only winning move is not to play.
> Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you.
Gwern's article cites many, many peer reviewed journal articles (aka mainstream medical science) about how nicotine's addictiveness is overblown, and you're citing three tweets.
Common sense points to you being clueless in all of your writing, even though I haven't read it, and I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view.
Citing individual papers is not how you do science. Science requires the full context of an entire domain, which may include high quality papers which contradict each other.
Mm, of course, the already-too-long and too-heavily-referenced essay just needed to be longer and more referenced, then it would count as Science, which would give it the standing to be allowed to challenge those two tweets.
In general, I don’t think there is a reasonable standard that can be applied to both the essay and the putatively refuting tweets that will privilege the latter. Juxtaposing the two was an own goal.
To bring things full circle, I’ve heard that in the rationality community, it’s actually high status to publicly change your mind and disavow your argument when you realise it’s flawed. I think that’s a neat piece of social technology.