No evidence is provided for the safety of THC vaping products. An NYT article that was clearly biased against THC was picked apart instead. The clear implication is that THC vapes were unjustly targeted and readers should assume the contrary of the dishonest NYT article. i.e. That THC vapes are safe. Yet, no direct evidence of that is provided. A possibly fatal lie is told purely with true facts.
Here's why that matters: THC is a recreational product. It's relatively recent legalization in only some jurisdictions is why we're just starting to get good data on it. Vaping is even newer and less well studied.
Okay, so let's say there's no clear evidence that THC vapes are harmful. I'm being a dishonest fear-monger. Or am I?
What should be the default position on recreational drugs? Specifically, ones that are inhaled? Ask a respirologist. Lungs are delicate and, if you screw yours up, you're really fubar'd. They'll tell you that, if you do want to use a relatively unstudied recreational drug, eat it or shove it up your ass. (Seriously, THC enemas are a thing.) Don't put it in your lungs.
The default position for inhaling drugs should be, "Don't" until they're proven safe. This is my opinion/bias/dishonest-agenda.
Does that make more sense to you now?
That's not the point - gwerns article dismantled the NYT article. If one read (or heard about) the NYT article and used it as "proof" of "vaping is bad", gwern is saying: "not so fast". That's not to say "vaping is healthy", nor even "vaping is not unhealthy" - just that this article isn't the proof you're looking for. Vaping (legal flavoured nicotine (which is what's on trial)) could be horrible - simply citing instances of why this is so isn't actually done in the article.
If it matters, I'm not condoning vaping or smoking at all.
The NYT article was suppose to be about nicotine vapes and in it, they used an example that only appears related because it's a vape. The harm caused by the illegally marketed/unapproved incidence doesn't prove the new york times summary: nicotine vapes are harmful.
The fact presented about the THC vape incidences arn't categorically related to the use and marketing of nicotine vapes.
The point of the article is to showcase how examples can be technically correct (vaping superset) but not actually provide relevance (THC vapes w/vitamin E acetate caused lung damage).
Wanna jump out of an airplane with no parachute and see if one of your buddies can strap one on you before you hit the ground? Totally fine with me.
Wanna base-jump off a skyscraper in NYC with a wing-suit ? Fuck off. You’ll probably hurt someone else who didn’t sign up for that.
That said, I’d also like the CPSC to look into whether products like this are safe and hold manufacturers accountable for their consequences.
I’d also very much appreciate it if the FTC and FDA actually did thorough random testing of drugs and supplements (recreational or therapeutic) to ensure that the actual ingredients and doses match the label. The FDA requires drug manufacturers to be in compliance, but doesn’t actually test drugs themselves, they mostly just look over paperwork to see if the processes followed would probably produce the correct product and assume the paperwork isn’t manipulated.
In fact, the FDA actively works to prevent people, even the Pentagon, from doing independent 3rd party drug testing of common pharmaceuticals [0]
0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-12-05/pentagon-... / https://archive.is/eyWSn
>Wanna base-jump off a skyscraper in NYC with a wing-suit ? Fuck off. You’ll probably hurt someone else who didn’t sign up for that.
Are they not the same?
Also the aeroplane itself is a highly regulated piece of this system
Also the first example (jumping out of plane with no parachute at all) is perfectly legal.
> An NYT article that was clearly biased against THC
This was an NYT article clearly biased against nicotine. One of us is confused here. Maybe I can't follow your particular idiom.
The critique is: "This article uses a rhetorical device (THC vapes with vitamin E acetate are harmful) to suggest that nicotine vapes are harmful, when there's nothing in common other than being a vape product"
It's goal isn't to refute the evidence, but to suggest the editors and writers of the articles did not provide a sufficient connection between the THC-vape incidents and the harm caused by nicotine vapes, yet spent the entire article convolution any distinctions between the two, to implicate nicotine vaping as equally harmful as the THC infused vitamin-e lung damage incidents.
Had the writers & editors at the NYT had any nicotine vape related direct harm, that would have connected the THC-vape incidences. But just writing this sentence, you can see how continually repeating THC-vape incidences biases you to understanding that there's a difference.
And that's the point, NYT article went out of it's way to convolute direct harm incidences to a broader vaping category when there's no evidence to suggest nicotine vaping is susceptable to the same direct harm. It's like saying bob drove his car drunk & crashed, therefore, driving cars is dangerous. We know it's dangerous but the "driving drunk" doesn't prove they're dangerous. You can do lots of dangerous things while drunk.
Similarly, THC-infused vitamin E acetate in vapes caused lung damage. Is the operable cause the Vape or the THC-infused vitamin E acetate; no evidence is presented that it's anything other than the vape liquid by all other sources. That is to say, no evidence by NYT is presented that some other substance in a vape is equally harmful.
If you want to get into the science, go ahead, a vape is vaporizing things. So it matters what those things it's vaporizing is. And if it's incomplete vaporization, then it's possible harmful chemicals are being generated. So perhaps the article needed to present the basic facts about vapes.
> So perhaps the article needed to present the basic facts about vapes.
The whole last third of the NYT article is about how we don't (or did not at the time) know what substances may be at play, with several specific agents called out.
Ideally don't inhale anything that's not fairly clean air.
On a deeper level you have several interested parties (vaping companies, tobacco companies, public health interests that get funding for whatever reasons) that stand to lose or gain alot of money depending on how it's regulated.
Or you you might even have politicians looking for donations from the people that are selling vapes or more likely, politicians that are seeing a potential new tax revenue source and our feeling out the level of opposition or support for it.
I don't think the NYTs goes for scare stories for the most part.
I grew up reading NYTimes on the weekend with my parents. I held them in extreme high regard when it came to their news and journalistic integrity. Over the years, I've shifted to think of them as another data point. For the industries that I'm most familiar with (Tech, Finance, and Pharma), I find their reporting often shallow, lacking in nuance, or intentional/unintentional misreporting. And I often wonder if their reporting of other areas is similarly lacking.
Now, they are just another data point, which is sad.
Michael Crichton said it best:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Very respectfully, as pre-teen at the time, I recognized that there was no real reason for going from 9/11 to Afghanistan or Iraq... based on my then daily reading of NYT. And I am sure there were opinion articles in that same paper that said we were rushing towards something that demanded deeper reflection.
Fundamentally, I don't think the job of a newspaper is to think for us.
All the absurdities of that time were, in fact, news. What wasn't present at the time was a link to justify the inane war we began. And that link is still absent, which we are all collectively realizing.
"7 countries in 5 years; Iraq Syria Lebanon Libya Somalia Sudan and finishing off with Iran"
well here we are 25 years later finally getting around to that last one...
i would much rather read this collation directly, give me bullet points. in such a structured format it would also be easier to analyze if a given statement is too specific or has too many qualifiers. it would also be easier to notice what's missing.
I've been trying to find a place where people write down these tricks so that I can at least name and classify them for myself. There's one that particularly gets me, a kind of false aggregation. Say breast cancer is 99% treatable and costs $1m and prostate cancer is 1% treatable and the most you'd spend is $1k. Suppose someone said "cancers can be as bad as 1% treatable while attempts can be up to $1m to do". Well, that makes it sound like there's a cancer where you spend a mil and it's 1%. This kind of false aggregation obscures the truth.
It would be useful to me so I can concisely name this kind of thing and then work with it to preserve epistemic hygiene.
0: The distinctively beautiful website is brand enough haha
It shows us that we are strong, and others are weak, and that we need to attack the weak before they become strong and destroy us.
This sort of shit sells like hotcakes.
Public health officials are throwing their credibility into a bonfire when they land on a fixation and use heavy handed strategies to pursue their goals, without a sense of proportionality or efficacy.
On the flip side I can literally type "vape shop" into Google and get a handful of options in walking distance that I could stroll into legally and purchase whatever I wanted, as long as it was not flavored. That too is something Google is happy to share with me.
Meth, with varying levels of fentanyl adulteration, you can get delivered or buy from the street corner, depending on your neighborhood. From where I am, I'd estimate about 10 minutes to get a hold of the meth; 20 minutes to get a hold of any vape; and Juul probably an hour (place in Daly City sells them; I'd have to drive).
This concern is addressed in the article.
> it would be possible to write this story without bringing in irrelevant THC-contaminated anecdotes or EVALI, by focusing on legitimate criticisms of nicotine vaping. (You could discuss teen access, flavor marketing, age checks, FDA jurisdiction, statutory drafting, the economics of disposable devices, and the adult harm-reduction case without ever mentioning EVALI which you know is not related to teen access to legal anything.)
If you need nic, snus is by far the best for you.
gwern’s writing (including on nicotine) was formative for me; it showed me how and why the internet the was important: it let me read good, well written thinking I had never seen from the NYTs or my parents.
I first saw a link to gwern.net on HN. And I trusted the NYTs as an institution then, and do to this day… and I’m sure I clicked through, and took the gwern post seriously in part because comments weren’t universally negative.
You can point to bounded trust problems, or talk more about how “The Media Very Rarely Lies”…
But please don’t take up the first comment on a gwern post to cheap shot the NYTs
I'm not exactly going to get outraged at the NYT's rhetorical tactics against vaping.
In this way, the harms of lying compound while the benefits do not. For this reason I believe it highly unwise to allow it to be normalized.
