Comment by gjm11
5 days ago
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
Aristotelian physics is simpler than Newtonian physics, which is simpler than either relativity or quantum mechanics, both of which will probably turn out to be simpler than whatever theory we come up with that somehow encompasses both.
Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis is shorter than On the origin of species, which in turn is shorter than the shelf-full of books you would need to cover all the details Darwin didn't know about.
The truth does generally turn out to be simpler than its alternatives, when you fill in all their details and add the epicycles you need to make them consistent with what we actually observe. In some sense that's how we recognize the truth: it's what you don't need to keep making increasingly implausible excuses for.
But it's not reliably "very simple" if that means "short blogpost length at most", and things that purport to be that simple often turn out to be simple only in appearance. (Like saying "a witch did it", which in some sense can explain anything, and for the exact same reason explains nothing until you've filled in lots of details about what witches can do and how, at which point it stops looking like a good explanation for anything.)
You should join lesswrong.
Cocaine is bad. So is nicotine. Because on balance they are bad, even if they have good properties. You can spend 30K words on 'the good sides' but on balance they are still bad.
"On balance they are still bad" is a statement that one justifies by actually comparing the good and bad properties. It seems pretty clear (though I could be wrong!) that for cocaine the bad outweighs the good. It's less obvious for nicotine or, to name another legal stimulant drug, caffeine.
But apparently spending 30k words trying to explore the tradeoff is a bad thing? Because it should just be obvious that Nicotine Is Bad on balance, without weighing up the benefits and the harms?
I dunno, maybe gwern's article about nicotine is in fact terrible. I've only looked at it very briefly, and superficially it looks reasonable to me.
"But it turns out that actually nicotine[1] is addictive and bad for you -- Alex's post had a link supporting that." Eh. Alex's post had a link to something that ... actually could be fairly summarized as "I haven't found nicotine[1] addictive and it seems to be good for me overall". What Alex presumably has in mind is the three tweets at the end of the article, under the heading "PS: Be careful". One claims, not giving any evidence, that a bunch of people read gwern's article and ended up addicted to tobacco. One claims, not giving any details, that gwern's article "almost ruined my life". One sketches a way someone could end up in trouble after reading the article, though it isn't clear to me whether its author is saying "this is what happened to me" or "I can imagine this happening" and it looks much more like the latter.
[1] Throughout this paragraph "nicotine" means "nicotine not taken by smoking or vaping"; it isn't surprising that there might be a difference and gwern's article very strongly advises not doing those things.
If you weren't predisposed to think ill of gwern and his writing, would you actually be impressed by this? On the one hand we have what looks like a careful weighing of harms and benefits, with references to the literature; on the other hand we have at most three anecdotes with no details at all. It could still be that they're right and gwern's wrong, of course, but "look at this loser, he posted all those words and here are three tweets that point the other way" doesn't seem like much of an argument to me.
Some of Gwerns's articles are evergreens and I really like them.
This one in particular looks like a lot of handwaving and justification for self medication.
People aren't perfect. Gwern has a good reputation but he's still human and most likely has flaws, this one article in particular looks pretty flawed to me.