[HN Gopher] Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels
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Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels
Author : t0bia_s
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-01-07 09:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tobacco.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (tobacco.stanford.edu)
| sparrish wrote:
| And people wonder why others don't "trust the science".
| krapp wrote:
| Which science don't you trust, the science that once said
| smoking is harmless or the science which currently says smoking
| is harmful? Or do you cover all your bases and just not trust
| science regardless?
| renewiltord wrote:
| One who believes in that line trusts neither, one imagines.
| The thing that people often misunderstand about not trusting
| something is that it is different from believing it is
| guaranteed to be wrong. Not trusting something means that it
| doesn't provide evidence. i.e. if you don't trust some source
| X, and X provides some evidence X_A about some event A then
| not trusting them means that P(A|X_A) ~= P(A) your prior
| probability.
|
| People often interpret the "I don't trust X" statement to be
| "belief in the opposite", i.e. P(!A|X_A) = 1. This is
| obviously stupid since someone you distrust could happily
| manufacture evidence for !A and then you'd conclude
| P(!!A|X_!A) = 1 so they could make you believe anything,
| which is obviously not something you want someone you
| distrust to do to you.
| skygazer wrote:
| I'm not sure that's correct in practice. The people that
| harbor vocal distrust in agencies, professions, etc. really
| do seem more apt to directly believe whatever is in
| opposition to the "distrusted" message. While your proposal
| remains a logical alternative to them, adoption seems
| markedly low.
| fullshark wrote:
| Nah, they "believe" in that line when the science says
| anything that contradicts their priors. When the science
| says anything that confirms them they ingest and cite it
| gladly.
| janalsncm wrote:
| It's a category error. "Science" doesn't have a pope. It
| isn't whatever the latest scientist says. Science is a
| process for figuring things out.
| wahern wrote:
| Was there ever any sustained science that claimed smoking was
| harmless? AFAIU, smoking was considered by the general
| population as not good for you health since at least the
| early 20th century, and before then as at least a vice (as
| was caffeine!). By mid century there was sustained scientific
| output showing clear links to cancer, solidifying cigarettes
| as an acute hazard to your health even if the scope and
| magnitude of the harms were less than we know today. Tobacco
| companies and their defenders countered this sentiment using
| the same tools used today--dissembling, whataboutism, and
| your basic FUD techniques. You can't look at ads promoting
| cigarettes and assume most people accepted what they're
| communicating at face value.
|
| Anyhow, almost everybody knows today that, for example,
| eating too much sugar is bad for you, but the majority of the
| population still does it. That's how humans behave. Often
| times people do something _because_ it 's bad, taboo, or
| dangerous. And not everybody centers their lifestyle around
| good health; some people are just trying to get through the
| day. Today we still have doctors who smoke, dentists who
| drink soda, etc, though those particular vices are less
| popular than they once were. And let's not forget, while
| cigarette smoking has been in free fall doctors have been
| happily handing out prescriptions to smoke marijuana, even
| though inhaling marijuana smoke is at least as harmful as
| cigarettes (most people smoke it less frequently, but that's
| beside the point). Just because something is accepted as
| normal doesn't mean the harms are being outright denied.
| jdietrich wrote:
| "The science" never said that smoking is harmless. Concerns
| were being raised as early as the 1930s and epidemiological
| evidence had conclusively demonstrated the link between
| tobacco smoking, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease by
| the early 1950s. The tobacco industry pursued a relentless
| campaign to cast doubt on that science, which was so
| successful that even today people imagine that there was once
| an actual controversy.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2085438/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement
| ty6853 wrote:
| The tobacco industry also shifted to the most deadly form,
| cigarettes. Casual low use cigar smokers that don't inhale
| ( proper way to smoke cigar ) iirc have lower lung cancer
| and higher life expectancy than non smokers. Pipes and
| cigar were generally better especially when used in
| moderation even against moderate cigarette smoking.
|
| Although generally the US just has bad tobacco habits.
| 'European' style smoking of a cigarette with coffee a
| couple times a week likely will kill you slower than
| whatever was going to get you like cooking and eating smoky
| grilled meats.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| It's kind of a "tell", right? On the face of things, it would
| make just as much sense to say "More software devs smoke Camels
| than any other cigarette." You wouldn't call out "doctors"
| unless everyone knew this was unhealthy.
| awnird wrote:
| You are confusing science with ad copy.
| adamc wrote:
| No, but the post implies a belief that many people will
| confuse the two. And it might be right.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| There was a lot of science paid by big tobacco (and big sugar
| and many others like hydrogenated fats), that then turned
| into ads.
| exe34 wrote:
| the antidote to bad science has always been more science by
| independent experts.
|
| what else would you suggest?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| He was pointing out the hypocrisy in "trust the science"
| buzzwords used during the pandemic. Science is based on
| skepticism, not "trust", and being a skeptic back then was
| somehow considered censorship-worthy.
|
| edit: because i'm being rate-limited, i'm refering to stuff
| like this:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc.
| ..
|
| > And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re
| vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today
| suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the
| virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical
| trials but it`s also in real world data.
|
| Hey, the media, the CDC, "the science" says that if you're
| vaccinated, you're safe, you won't infect your
| immunocompromised grandma, you won't get sick, you won't
| spread covid. I mean... don't be a skeptic, "trust" them.
| exe34 wrote:
| no, the skepticism is for people who understand what they
| are being skeptical about. if you have a degree in
| chemistry and you disagree with one other chemist, I'd have
| to listen to both of you and try to make up my own mind. if
| you disagree with 99% of chemists, then I'm not ingesting
| what you suggest nor avoiding what they recommend.
|
| you don't get to point to Facebook posts by uncle Rob who
| reposts crackpot ideas 24/7 and call that "a controversy".
| there is such a thing as being wrong.
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| There seemed to be a lot of loud, bad-faith, antagonists in
| that era that likely ended up killing a lot of people.
| Things like drinking bleach, using de-wormer, don't get
| vaccines, masks are bad for you, etc... It was exhausting
| to hear because it got a whole big group of people to
| cosplay domain experts and the rest of us had to deal with
| the fallout of millions dying.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Sure, there are nutjobs everywhere, but contrary to
| principles of science, _everyone_ was told to "trust the
| science".
|
| Not "be skeptical, verify, repeat, etc.", but "trust"....
| you shouldn't have to blidndly trust science, that's
| reserved for nutjobs speaking to god by yelling into a
| hat, where there's no way to verify.
|
| Many people also got vaccinated because the science
| mentioned 94% (or whatever) effciveness against covid
| infections, about preventing spread, and guess what,
| trusting that killed immunocompromised grandma too.
| mulmen wrote:
| Assertion: a tobacco company used misleading marketing
| practices.
|
| Conclusion: science is a lie.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| > In an attempt to substantiate the "More Doctors" claim, R.J.
| Reynolds paid for surveys to be conducted during medical
| conventions using two survey methods: Doctors were gifted free
| packs of Camel cigarettes at tobacco company booths and them upon
| exiting the exhibit hall, were then immediately asked to indicate
| their favorite brand or were asked which cigarette they carried
| in their pocket.
|
| It was a different time and people genuinely did not know the
| harms of smoking like we do now, but this would be wrong to a
| caveman from 10000 BC
| jareds wrote:
| I can't get to worked up about the way the surveys were
| conducted since this was advertising. If R.J. Reynolds were
| trying to publish peer reviewed papers based on there survey
| results and excluded the fact that the doctors were given free
| cigarettes that would be more of an issue. I'm sure much worse
| stuff was done in an effort to hide the health effects of
| smoking but it's not something I have familiarity with.
| adamc wrote:
| The ethical standards of advertising are obviously very, very
| low.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember, in the 1980s, the American Heart Association never
| listed tobacco as a contributor to heart disease. I'm pretty
| sure that the tobacco industry figured highly, in their funding
| sources.
|
| These days, they are very adamant that tobacco is a big factor.
|
| Also, I believe that a lot of stress research (the one that
| created the "Type A personality") was funded by the tobacco
| industry.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > It was a different time
|
| Not that different.
|
| > and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like
| we do now
|
| The tobacco companies knew very well. IIRC, the medical
| community kinda-sorta knew and kinda-sorta suppressed the
| knowledge.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Ads back then had _so much copy_. What's with that? Was it easy
| to command attention for that long because there wasn't much else
| to do? No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with?
| vel0city wrote:
| I see magazines with _multi-page_ ads which read exactly like
| articles but have additional labeling that they 're explicitly
| ads written by the company instead of ads written by the
| writers of the magazine. Often with slightly different styling.
|
| This example magazine has a number of single page ads with a
| good bit of copy in them. I'm trying to find an example
| magazine with those multi-page ads at the moment though.
|
| https://flickread.com/edition/html/676148065c1ba#1
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I think those style of ads are called advertorials, so that
| might help you find them. Internet Archive has lots of
| magazine scans.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial
| pier25 wrote:
| No website to check the details of a product either
| jdietrich wrote:
| The people who are actually interested in your product will
| generally want lots of information. Prior to the internet, how
| did they actually get that information? Overwhelmingly, through
| print advertising. If people who have no interest in your
| product see the headline and turn the page before getting to
| the body copy, that's no real loss; if people who are
| interested in your product have questions that aren't answered
| by the copy, that is potentially a very real loss.
| warner25 wrote:
| I suspect that there was little data to analyze how much
| attention the ads were commanding back then.
|
| I often think about how so many things now have been optimized
| (mostly for profit) to the extreme by data-driven processes,
| with big corporate marketing certainly being one of them.
|
| Up until two or three decades ago, I suspect that it was all
| based on tradition and the "gut feel" of out-of-touch and
| arrogant executives talking to each other over drinks (thinking
| of scenes from _Mad Men_ here).
| Hilift wrote:
| The country was founded on tobacco. It was used as currency for
| the first 150 years.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| If there's any truth to the pop culture trope of trading
| cigarette cartons in prisons, it possibly never stopped being
| used as currency.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| It would be black market currency now. Most US jails and
| prisons ban cigarettes.
| kaonwarb wrote:
| This is a bit broad. Tobacco was _very_ significant in Virginia
| and Maryland (which, along with North Carolina, did use it as
| money for a period--before the United States was an independent
| nation [0]). Its influence outside of that region was
| significant, but I wouldn 't characterize it as foundational.
|
| [0] https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-
| thesauruse...
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| It is interesting that these ads are particularly targeted at
| women - maybe I am looking too much in to it, but I would guess
| there was (is) a big gender disparity with tobacco health
| concerns. These ads are quite different from the Marlboro Man -
| "tough cigarettes for tough men."
| janalsncm wrote:
| One potential reason might be because these ads were in women's
| magazines? I'm sure they advertised in men's magazines as well.
| It would be interesting to compare.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Marlboro was originally marketed to women under the slogan
| "Mild as May", before being repositioned as a cigarette for men
| in the 1950s.
|
| https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/light-super-ultra-li...
| aliher1911 wrote:
| You may want to search "Torches of Freedom" and go down that
| rabbit hole.
| ajayvk wrote:
| The "Costlier Tobaccos" tag line looks strange now. Products
| which want to show sophistication no longer promote the fact that
| they are more expensive.
| freedomben wrote:
| I was recently listening to old Abbott & Costello radio shows
| from 1946 and they were also heavily sponsored by Camel and
| frequently played an audio ad of "more doctors smoke camels." I
| got quite a kick out of it! They really ran hard with that
| message.
| paul7986 wrote:
| What is the cigarettes of today that we later learn it's not good
| for us or it does nothing ... recycling or drinking water from
| plastic bottles?
| munchler wrote:
| Social media. I think many people already realize this, but it
| hasn't yet hit a tipping point.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| https://tobacco.stanford.edu/
|
| Several other collections are interesting though somewhat
| strange. Like Pepsi used to make similar ads.
| mttpgn wrote:
| An excerpt from _How to Lie with Statistics_ by Darrell Huff
| (1954):
|
| > Take this one: "27 percent of a large sample of eminent
| physicians smoke Throaties--more than any other brand." The
| figure itself may be phony, of course, in any of several ways,
| but that really doesn't make any difference. The only answer to a
| figure so irrelevant is "So what?" With all proper respect toward
| the medical profession, do doctors know any more about tobacco
| brands than you do? Do they have any inside information that
| permits them to choose the least harmful among cigarettes? Of
| course they don't, and your doctor would be the first to say so.
| Yet that "27 percent" somehow manages to sound as if it meant
| something.
|
| That book specifies many other examples (from this time period in
| America) of misleading claims that sound statistically
| significant upon an uncritical, cursory reading.
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