Comment by murderfs
5 days ago
> 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.