[HN Gopher] Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels
___________________________________________________________________
Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels
Author : t0bia_s
Score : 91 points
Date : 2025-01-07 09:12 UTC (2 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| What are you implying here? That Europeans don't get
| addicted to nicotine?
| 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 for some reason (thanks
| mods), 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.
|
| Or you can say "even if you're vaccinated, you'll still get
| covid and still infect grandma", and be censored from most
| platforms" (back then).
| 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.
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| > trusting that killed immunocompromised grandma too.
|
| This is the sort of stuff that I was referring to above.
| It sounds shocking and plausible, but at the end of the
| day, if you flatly ask someone "would you like a 10%
| chance to die from covid (being a grandma), or would you
| like (some lower %) chance to die to prevent it", then
| why not try?
| sethammons wrote:
| What if you ask them, instead, "would you like a 1%
| chance of dying of covid (being a healthy male under 40)
| or an unknown chance at an unknown reaction that may
| include myocarditis from a new treatment?", then why do
| it?
|
| For a while, this was what those around me were saying.
| It was much, much later that covid itself was associated
| with even more myocarditis than the vaccine.
| exe34 wrote:
| > unknown chance
|
| for values of "unknown chance" well under 1 in 100,000.
| you sound like the same kind of American who prefers the
| quarter pounder to the third pounder because 4 > 3.
| sethammons wrote:
| I know four very negative covid vaccine reactions and
| zero covid anythings aside from two people saying it was
| the sickest they have ever felt. I don't know 100k
| people. Make up any stat that makes you feel smug to
| throw shade at my math skills. From my personal, lived
| experience, you can't say the sky ain't blue.
| exe34 wrote:
| Yes, anecdotes trump population studies any day. You
| really are dumb.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| No, the question is, do you 'trust the science', the
| quote from the director of cdc:
|
| > 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.
|
| ...and the visit grandma, who cannot get vaccinated
| (immunocompromised), because you're vaccinated, and don't
| carry the virus and don't get sick?
|
| Or are you one of those 'conspiracy theorists' who say
| "the vaccinated are carrying the virus, even if you're
| vaccinated, you'll still get sick and kill grandma"?
| exe34 wrote:
| > Not "be skeptical, verify, repeat, etc.", but
| "trust"...
|
| that's because you don't have the skills for it. you
| can't even deal with poor reporting, but you want to
| verify/repeat?
|
| did you also let your kids operate the oven before they
| could walk?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| So a direct quote by the director of the cdc is poor
| reporting?
|
| And what skills do I need? "The science" was literally
| changing every few days.
|
| Trust us, vaccinated pople don't carry the virus.
|
| And then a few months later "whoops".
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-checkoutdated-
| vid...
|
| > In the clip, Dr Fauci says "There's no reason to be
| walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of
| an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a
| little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but
| it's not providing the perfect protection that people
| think that it is. And, often, there are unintended
| consequences -- people keep fiddling with the mask and
| they keep touching their face."
|
| Trust us, there's no reason to be walking around with a
| mask.
|
| And then a few weeks later, again "trust us, you need a
| mask".
|
| To simplify for you, you can trust yor girlfriend
| (boyfriend, whatver), but after s/he cheats on you
| multiple times and changes her(his) story the same amount
| of times, the trust is lost.
| exe34 wrote:
| > "The science" was literally changing every few days"
|
| the world's sum total knowledge about the virus was
| changing from day to day - what did you want - stone
| tablets and burning bushes?
|
| the mask message made sense: they were very clear, that
| in the early stages, it didn't make sense for everybody
| to wear them (community transmission was still low) and
| deprive medical personnel who needed them desperately
| (they were far more likely to encounter the virus for
| reasons I hope you are smart enough to figure out for
| yourself - but shout out and I'll try to explain further
| if it's not clear).
|
| later on when community transmission was high and we had
| much larger supplies of masks, it made sense for more
| people to wear them, because then it would make a
| difference to the total transmission.
|
| it seems that you just wanted an all knowing parental
| figure to tell you what to do and never change their
| opinion - that's not how real life works. in the adult
| world, when new information becomes available, or the
| situation changes, the rules can be changed. this isn't
| church.
|
| and yes, even the chief of the cdc can be wrong, speak
| wrong, make mistakes, or get a message across poorly
| trying to produce short and snappy soundbites that the
| likes of you have a chance of remembering. but the
| underlying message wasn't wrong, it was correct based on
| available evidence at the time. it was a stressful
| situation and they probably didn't get much sleep for
| several months.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But for science to change, you must NOT trust existing
| science. The opposite of what 'the science' was telling
| people to do - "trust science".
|
| The first mask message was that you don't need a mask. If
| you then censor and ban everyone who says "don't listen
| to fauci, buy a mask", and a few weeks later ban everyone
| who says "listen to fauci's statement two weeks ago, you
| don't need a mask", who's left then? If the "science
| changed", then the people not trusting the first "truth"
| were correct in not trusting it. But we censored them and
| called them idiots for buying and wearing masks, before
| the 'science changed'. They didn't trust fauci and the
| science, and had masks, the ones who trusted, didn't.
|
| People literally died, that could have been saved by
| wearing a mask before mask mandates. Also people died
| because they trusted the vaccines, and killed other
| people, because they trusted the vaccines wold prevent
| spread. If you trusted the CDC director and visited
| grandma, you might have killed her. If you didnt trust
| the effectiveness of vaccines, you didn't visit her, and
| she could be still alive.
|
| We had 4 types of vaccines in my country, astrazeneca,
| j&j, moderna and pfizer. All of them were "safe and
| effective". Then astrazeneca was pulled out, because of
| heart issues, but the other three were safe and
| effective. Then j&j was pulled out. Then moderna. In my
| country (~2mio pop), we had 5 deaths with(!) covid in the
| sub 35yo group (with the wonky counting of deaths), which
| is less than suicide deaths, overdoses, etc. Also 1
| vaccine death (
| https://www.gov.si/en/news/2021-11-30-expert-commission-
| conf... )
|
| Look, I know what you're trying to say, scientists know
| what they're doing, but i'm pointing out that "trust" is
| not the right word to be used with science. Church? Sure,
| trust someone with some imaginary friend, because more
| than trust is impossible. But with science (as you said
| "total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to
| day"), you cannot call people to 'trust' it, because
| (again, as you said yourself), the science was wrong and
| "changed" and trust is broken.
|
| Also "hey, we lied to you before, because we were
| incompetent at buying masks for medcical workers, so we
| instead chose to risk your life instead" is a stupid
| argument. This is how you lose what little is left of
| "trust" in those authorities.
|
| TLDR: if you trust, you're stuck with stone tablets and
| burning bushes (well, leeches and smoke enemas in case of
| medical treatments). Only with distrust can science go
| forwards. If we banned all the smoke-enema skeptics back
| then, we'd never more onwards from there.
| exe34 wrote:
| > The first mask message was that you don't need a mask.
| If you then censor and ban everyone who says "don't
| listen to fauci, buy a mask", and a few weeks later ban
| everyone who says "listen to fauci's statement two weeks
| ago, you don't need a mask", who's left then? If the
| "science changed", then the people not trusting the first
| "truth" were correct in not trusting it. But we censored
| them and called them idiots for buying and wearing masks,
| before the 'science changed'. They didn't trust fauci and
| the science, and had masks, the ones who trusted, didn't.
|
| Firstly, nobody in the medical establishment nor
| government told anybody they were idiots for wearing a
| mask. They said masks were not necessary. Nobody censored
| them, you are getting your timelines confused. You should
| talk to a medical professional about that. The people
| whose comments had a "fact check" added were the ones
| saying you shouldn't wear a mask when it became important
| to wear one.
|
| I think I can see where you're struggling. It's likely
| you are too stupid to understand it, but I'm feeling
| generous, so I'm going to try anyway. Early on in a
| pandemic, if you have 300M people, and 1% have the virus,
| and 1% of that shows symptoms and go to the hospital, you
| have 30,000 people showing up at hospitals with the
| potential to infect say 10 medical personel they come
| into contact each - so you need fully 300,000 masks being
| worn by the professionals. If the national supply of
| masks is 500,000, then it makes no sense for the whole
| population to wear them. The individual non-medical
| person is very unlikely to come across an infected person
| during their day, while the doctors desperately need them
| to be able to keep helping those who need it. Does that
| make sense?
|
| Once there is community transmission, and 20% of the
| population has the virus, then the average person has a
| much higher probability of coming across the virus and
| getting infected - this was also much later in the
| pandemic, so the supply of masks was much higher. Then it
| makes sense for everybody to wear them, and cunts like
| you who then went around pulling them off people's faces
| put them at risk. Do you get it?
|
| There is a very big difference here, and I really hope
| you get it this time, I have tried really hard to explain
| it.
|
| > But for science to change, you must NOT trust existing
| science. The opposite of what 'the science' was telling
| people to do - "trust science".
|
| Who's "you"? You? No, you're a dumb idiot. It's not about
| not trusting - it's about knowing that new information
| could justify a change in policy and not trying to hide
| it. This isn't the republican convention or the catholic
| church trying to hide criminal evidence - it's about
| accepting that new information can and should change your
| mind.
|
| > People literally died, that could have been saved by
| wearing a mask before mask mandates.
|
| I think you're full of shit. Nobody was stopped from
| wearing a mask if they wanted. The message was that there
| was no need for the general population to wear them and
| deprive the doctors who did absolutely need them. People
| with compromised immune systems were told early on to
| avoid crowds, to take precautions, etc. I suspect a very
| small number of people died from that. If you think it's
| a significant population, that's on you to provide
| evidence.
|
| > Also people died because they trusted the vaccines,
|
| This one is very well documented - a minuscule number of
| people died from the vaccines, and they had conditions
| that would have killed them if they got the actual virus
| anyway. It wasn't a vaccine specific issue.
|
| > and killed other people, because they trusted the
| vaccines wold prevent spread. If you trusted the CDC
| director and visited grandma, you might have killed her.
| If you didnt trust the effectiveness of vaccines, you
| didn't visit her, and she could be still alive.
|
| Again, I think you are full of shit. The people who
| decided to visit and kill grandma were specifically those
| who didn't give a shit about anybody but themselves, and
| were doing it anyway. They weren't likely to have been
| vaccinated in the first place.
|
| > We had 4 types of vaccines in my country, astrazeneca,
| j&j, moderna and pfizer. All of them were "safe and
| effective". Then astrazeneca was pulled out, because of
| heart issues, but the other three were safe and
| effective. Then j&j was pulled out. Then moderna. In my
| country (~2mio pop), we had 5 deaths with(!) covid in the
| sub 35yo group (with the wonky counting of deaths), which
| is less than suicide deaths, overdoses, etc
|
| They weren't pulled out because of heart issues, they
| were replaced by newer versions for the new variants.
| Pull your head out of your arse for once.
|
| > Look, I know what you're trying to say, scientists know
| what they're doing, but i'm pointing out that "trust" is
| not the right word to be used with science. Church? Sure,
| trust someone with some imaginary friend, because more
| than trust is impossible. But with science (as you said
| "total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to
| day"), you cannot call people to 'trust' it, because
| (again, as you said yourself), the science was wrong and
| "changed" and trust is broken.
|
| The word you're thinking about is faith. You want
| unshakable faith in the word of the great leader - you're
| not going to find peace that way.
| nicoburns wrote:
| The emphasis on "trust the science" is the "the science",
| not "trust". Everyone ultimately needs to trust
| something, and it is better if that is a scientific
| consensus than if it's what the anchors on fox news are
| saying.
| 8note wrote:
| > 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.
|
| to my knowledge, this is not what the science said. the
| science always said "if youre vaccinated, you are less
| likely to experience severe covid symptoms"
| lmm wrote:
| The actual science, sure. But "the science" in the sense
| of what the media, and people arguing online, were
| claiming the science said, absolutely went a lot further
| than the evidence. It was widely claimed that the
| vaccines gave immunity, for example.
| defrost wrote:
| That's free speech in the US for you.
|
| Meanwhile, actual science, medical practitioners, have
| been clear for many decades that vaccines reduce
| infection and transmission rates, etc.
|
| Vaccines didn't "cure Polio" in any absolute sense, but
| they did make it possible to suppress it until it no
| longer appeared "in the wild" .. until it came back
| again.
| lmm wrote:
| Free speech beats the alternative. But it's important to
| realise that just because the media (or anyone)
| confidently claims something doesn't mean it's true (not
| generally because they're lying, just because they're
| wildly overconfident), and that's still true when they
| tell you what they're saying is "the science".
| defrost wrote:
| > (US) Free speech beats the alternative(s).
|
| Questionable.
|
| > and that's still true when they tell you what they're
| saying is "the science".
|
| Ditto "the earth is flat", "they are eating the cats",
| "it was a lab leak", .. etc.
|
| These are _opinions_ not science.
| exe34 wrote:
| did you set up an independent printing press and the
| government came to shut you down? if so, yes, your right
| to free speech was indeed gravely violated!
| verdverm wrote:
| There isn't one alternative, speech rights & laws are a
| spectrum
|
| It is certainly arguable that the American style is to
| extreme on the freedom side. There is little punishment
| for the immense amount of malicious lying by too many
| actors in the system
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I mean, I would love to make it illegal for a journalist
| to say "The science says X" when the science does not say
| X, but understand that for nearly all science, a
| journalist _is not equipped to know that!_
|
| Journalists are not scientists, and they are especially
| not scientists, and they do not have the foundation and
| fundamentals necessary to evaluate whether a paper backs
| up what a university PR department tells them to publish.
|
| The wealth of human knowledge is insanely vast, and
| basically infinitely recursive. A scientist in one tiny
| niche of physics can barely evaluate the papers of a
| scientist in another tiny niche of physics. Most niches
| in most sciences can't even fill an auditorium with
| experts.
|
| The most important thing to know in science is that if
| you are not reading the actual paper, you aren't getting
| scientific information but rather someone's
| interpretation and marketing copy. The second most
| important thing to know is that if you haven't written a
| scientific paper in the same domain, you will likely
| struggle to accurately interpret the results of one.
|
| When everyone was freaking out over LK-99, none of the
| losers on here or twitter were able to accurately assess
| the situation, and plenty of people outright bought the
| lies of that russian furry who claimed to be able to
| reproduce it, despite any evidence. It took actual domain
| experts, who were always emphatic that it didn't have
| good enough evidence to get too excited.
|
| There was a similar situation during the "Cold Fusion"
| nonsense in 1989. A couple chemists did some mediocre
| science and went on a PR tour with their "findings",
| quite literally saying their data was unquestionable and
| the rest of science needed to adapt their theories to the
| cold fusion data, which meanwhile was unpublished. These
| two fairly well trained and practiced scientists went and
| asked congress for something like $25 million on next to
| no data. An entire conference of Chemists cheered for
| them and their "findings". The findings were always
| invalid. Their experiments never generated the kinds of
| products you would expect from fusing deuterium.
|
| If even a room full of trained chemists cannot evaluate
| other chemists making downright basic errors in their
| research, how can we possibly expect average people with
| no scientific experience to keep up?
| verdverm wrote:
| I'd focus on politicians and corporations who lie through
| their teeth first, not journalists. I'd focus on the
| blatant and provably wrong statements, like where a
| politician says they did this thing to bring jobs to
| their constituents when in fact they voted against the
| bill
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Oh absolutely, I've long railed on about how absurdly
| weak and pitiful "truth in advertising" laws are in the
| US, but suggesting that a homeopathic medicine should not
| be able to call itself a "remedy" or "medicine" or
| anything like that drives people absolutely insane in the
| US. How dare you ~take away~ slightly change the label on
| my sugar pills!
|
| Consider that, if you pay someone to say something as a
| "testimonial", you can say basically whatever you want
| and face no legal consequences. It shouldn't be the job
| of the average consumer to take corps to court for
| selling shit based on lies, yet it is.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Do we have studies for this that compare two controlled
| groups in same environment?
|
| Don't fotget about "accidents" that spread Polio by
| vaccination on 120000 children, like Cutter incident.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories
| defrost wrote:
| > Do we have studies for this
|
| For many values of 'this' in the medical domain, yes.
|
| > Don't fotget about "accidents" that spread Polio by
| vaccination
|
| Err, the Cutter incident spread Polio via live polio
| virus rather than by Polio vaccination.
|
| Absolutely an example of a serious and deadly Quality
| Control f*ckup that led to a complete change in how
| vaccine production was approached.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Please, link those studies.
| exe34 wrote:
| > Do we have studies for this that compare two controlled
| groups in same environment?
|
| are you questioning the link between vaccines and polio
| almost entirely disappearing from all but about 4
| countries on the planet?
|
| what alternative "theory" do you have in this case?
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Increasing wealth and overall hygiene.
|
| 99% polio cases are nowadays in developing countries.
| exe34 wrote:
| What mechanism would you suggest connects wealth with
| polio?
| t0bia_s wrote:
| I'm not sure if I understand a question. You mean how
| could wealth help with disapearing of polio?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This quote is literally from the director of the CDC
| (source in comment above). I mean.. who better to
| 'trust'?
| defrost wrote:
| It's one of several quotes repeatedly dragged up in these
| discussions.
|
| Which peer reviewed paper was that quote sourced from?
| Which medical conference lecture was that statement made
| in?
|
| Oh, it was from a regular simplified human to human
| conversation in which the CDC director was indicating a
| comparitive result?
|
| WRT ppm's etc was that an accurate call of magnitude of
| difference in outcomes at that time?
| exe34 wrote:
| so because the science was reported sloppily, we can't
| trust science - instead of educating people?
| lmm wrote:
| We can't trust people who say "the science" is on their
| side. We can't trust popular science reporting. If you
| want to know what the science actually says, you have to
| dig into it yourself and e.g. read some papers (and even
| that might not be enough - you have to know which
| journals are credible and which aren't).
| exe34 wrote:
| But you can trust uncle Donny who comes up with crackpot
| theories 24/7?
| cindycindy wrote:
| It's the ups and downs from believing those ideas that
| people live for. They're all chasing a feeling, which is
| the basis of all addiction.
| sethammons wrote:
| That sloppy reporting _is_ the educating of people.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| The quote above is literally from the director of the CDC
| exe34 wrote:
| who is of course, infallible, never taken out of context,
| and never misrepresented. he said something you didn't
| understand once, and therefore everybody who says
| something you don't want to hear must be wrong.
|
| did I cover everything?
| mulmen wrote:
| Assertion: a tobacco company used misleading marketing
| practices.
|
| Conclusion: science is a lie.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Conclusion: People dying.
| weberer wrote:
| The actual conclusion: what the media spoonfeeds you is not
| science.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Do you know why I only drink grain alcohol, Mandrake?
| 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.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Much better now, to make you feel helpless, depressed,
| lacking just to keep you consuming anything
|
| Ethical standards are exactly the same, it's regulation that
| is very different, let's not give credit to corporations that
| they absolutely not deserve
| 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.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| > It was a different time and people genuinely did not know the
| harms of smoking like we do now
|
| My grandmother (born in 1928, started smoking at 13) said that,
| growing up, people casually referred to cigarettes as "cancer
| sticks".
| 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.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| Usually the copy is entirely devoid of "information" per se.
| It's a series of nice sounding but totally vacuous
| statements.
| 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).
| sethammons wrote:
| I took my marketing classes for my business degree in the
| early 2000s. Digital marketing was not addressed. The advice
| at the time was to get to six "impressions," six encounters
| with your brand before most people would start to recognize
| the brand. And it was very much admitted that you don't get
| to measure this and you must correlate sales trends with
| marketing trends. Very much "gut feel" in comparison of
| digital tracking. I'm still not convinced the tracking makes
| that big of a difference but obviously the market disagrees
| with me.
| bluGill wrote:
| Digital tracking can be helpful as a proxy, but what
| matters - and what big brands still measure - is how
| marketing correlates to sales. Statistics can figure out a
| lot of this, though the data is noisy.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > No smart phone in the waiting room to compete with?
|
| Yes. Sometimes it was a deliberate tactic - mostly adverts
| would go for the 'just an evocative picture', but a few would
| go the 'wall of text' route. My memory pops up the name Alan
| Sugar for an example of those - really dense walls ...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| People with self respect will find it insulting if an
| advertisement doesn't try to convince them with copy. In the
| past, advertisers wanted to be careful to not insult their
| prospective clients. Modern ads usually have an undertone of
| "we despise you" towards their prospective clients. I guess
| they figured out that it's better spent dollars to try to reach
| people without self respect.
| datavirtue wrote:
| There would have been a stack of these magazines in every home
| and each page would have been picked over several times.
|
| When I was a child magazines were still very popular and I
| would not rest until every last millimeter of each one was
| examined in detail multiple times.
| 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.
| failrate wrote:
| Cigarettes have been replaced with sealed packets of fish.
| 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.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| My understanding of this Stanford research group collection
| is that it is all the ads (or all they are able to find) - I
| don't think they were only collecting ads from women's
| magazines.
|
| If this ad campaign was mostly run in women's magazines, that
| supports the same hypothesis - presumably camel was running a
| different message to advertise toward men.
|
| But I'm not actually able to tell from the pictures which
| magazine the ad ran in - am I missing that somewhere?
| whycome wrote:
| Yeah the magazine name (and target) would be essential
| context that should be preserved along with the images
| themselves.
| 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.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| The only reason you don't see "Torches of Freedom" now is
| because PR has become infinitely more sophisticated. To the
| extent that you create your own Torches of Freedom by your
| own volition.
| bn-l wrote:
| Great point. I had a conversation with my sister on this
| topic recently. Maybe women are realising.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| I think it's because so many men smoked that marketing to women
| was a growth opportunity.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Advertisements in general are usually targeted to women, still
| today. They spend more and make the spending decisions if they
| have a husband.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > 85% of all consumer purchases in the U.S. are made by
| women.
|
| https://www.mccormickfona.com/articles/2014/12/purchasing-
| po...
| 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.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| I think they are saying that they are paying more to the
| tobacco suppliers than their competitors - kind of like saying
| "we use quality ingredients".
|
| There was another ad where they put quotes from tobacco farmers
| that said "nobody pays more for my tobacco than..."
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think modern term is "Premium". Which is more expensive than
| standard. Maybe it is more indirect, but it is very often
| there.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| In 60 years time it will look just as strange to see product
| advertisements from today boasting '10% reduced CO2 impact' or
| 'climate neutral'. I don't have a clue what they'll advertise
| with by that time but I do know it will look strange to those
| about half a century later. The advertising industry was never
| about objective truth, always about subjective emotions and I
| do not see that change other than advertising becoming ever
| more targeted.
| 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.
| aweiland wrote:
| We used to get Abbott & Costello tapes out from the library for
| long road trips in the 80s. To this day I still remember those
| Camel ads.
| freedomben wrote:
| If you're interested in reliving those glory days, the heroes
| & legends at OTRR[1] have done a phenomenal job at gathering
| and fixing up the old audio. The actual files are on
| archive.org[2]
|
| [1] https://otrr.org/
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Certified_Abbot_and_Cost
| ell...
| whycome wrote:
| Today, the message is brought to you by fanduel and bet365
| austinprete wrote:
| Hmm, which one do more doctors use?
| 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.
| paul7986 wrote:
| And AI but it's too new but maybe it will kill the Internet
| (social media with it) as nothing you see starts to be truly
| believable.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Visit a psych ward on a Friday night and let me know if it
| hasn't hit a tipping point yet. My wife works with several
| people who have kids that are cutting themselves and are in
| and out of psych treatment and ERs.
| harvodex wrote:
| As an ex pack a day smoker, realizing it doesn't really
| matter.
|
| I knew the first cigarette I smoked was a cancer causing
| terrible idea.
|
| The reason I did was because I was young and most other
| people I knew were doing the same thing. Same with social
| media.
| nicoburns wrote:
| In terms of things that we allow to be advertised but probably
| shouldn't: sodas, medical products, politicians.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Covid vaccines, sugar, plant meat...
| 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.
| croemer wrote:
| I think you don't mean "statistically significant" here, but
| something like "relevant" instead. Something can be
| statistically significant and entirely irrelevant if the effect
| size is too small.
| capnrefsmmat wrote:
| Ironically, Huff was then hired by the tobacco industry to
| write a book undermining the evidence that smoking causes
| cancer. It was to be called _How to Lie with Smoking
| Statistics_ , but never got published:
| https://www.refsmmat.com/files/papers/huff.pdf
| thedailymail wrote:
| I never noticed this until scrolling through this image gallery,
| but the design of these ads consistently and prominently
| highlights the first letters of "More Doctors," which was almost
| certainly intended to visually reinforce the M.D. association.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| It's wild to see the ad copy promote the high cost of Camels
| ("costlier tobacco".) I grew up fairly poor, but my dad always
| had money for cigarettes and was a 2-3 pack a day smoker. Almost
| always Camels. Occasionally Marlboros. In any case, I don't
| remember them being marketed as a cigarette for people who wanted
| to light more money on fire than their neighbors, but perhaps I
| just didn't pick up on it as a kid.
|
| During the early 90s, RJ Reynolds had a promotion called "Camel
| Cash", where each pack of cigarettes came with a coupon that
| could be redeemed for Camel merch (tshirts, beach towels, etc.)
| Our car was covered in cigarette ash, a vaguely sticky layer of
| tar, and stacks and stacks of Camel Cash. Most of the instrument
| cluster was obscured by Camel Cash stacked in front of it. We
| were Camel Cash millionaires.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > high cost of Camels ("costlier tobacco".)
|
| If memory serves, cigarette packs were priced fairly close to
| each other. They were implying they did not skimp on the
| quality of the source product (unlike the other brands'
| thieving profiteers ;-)
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| There were definitely "expensive" cigarettes and "cheap"
| cigarettes. It wasn't uncommon for my parents/their friends
| to go back and forth between a few brands as their fortunes
| changed.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I worked in a small kiosk in the late 80's. Most cigarettes
| were the same price, but Camels were quite a bit more
| expensive (25% or so as I recall.) Our target market was,
| how shall I put it, price sensitive. The Camels weren't
| terribly popular :)
| datavirtue wrote:
| They were also very strong and flavorful. Not something
| that a lot of people could handle.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| I remember Pall Mall and L&M as the cheaper brands. Maybe
| they weren't in your area?
| hackeraccount wrote:
| The interesting thing to me is the argument that the ad was
| confronting. That is that cigarettes are harmful one way or the
| other - which despite there being at the time almost zero
| evidence for apparently enough people thought that there was a
| need to cloak a particular brand with the association to doctors
| (who would presumably be smoking the "healthiest" cigarette).
|
| More generally I'm all for evidence showing what's healthy - eat
| some fruit and vegetables occasionally, get some exercise, don't
| smoke, don't drink - but I don't think any of these things are
| mysterious. Generally people have a good handle on what's good
| and what's bad for them. Now, they don't always do it but that's
| less to do with evidence then people seem to commonly suppose.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| > Generally people have a good handle on what's good and what's
| bad for them
|
| Hard disagree, the cultural norms play a huge role and the
| changes are slow. I'm like 95% sure the unabated addiction to
| social media so prevalent nowadays will be regarded similarly
| to how smoking and drinking is seen now.
|
| We should be really extrapolating what we know about tobacco
| now and the things they claimed in the past towards currently
| relevant issues e.g. "Facebook papers"-type materials.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| Most people it seems so know social media is bad for them.
| But people knowingly use many things that are bad for
| themselves.
| lolinder wrote:
| > despite there being at the time almost zero evidence for
|
| This isn't true--people had been connecting the dots for a few
| decades by the time these ads were running [0], and right
| around the start of the run (1940) was when strong evidence was
| starting to get published:
|
| > Scholars started noting the parallel rise in cigarette
| consumption and lung cancer, and by the 1930s had begun to
| investigate this relationship using the methods of case-control
| epidemiology. Franz Hermann Muller at Cologne Hospital in 1939
| published the first such study, comparing 86 lung cancer
| 'cases' and a similar number of cancer-free controls. Muller
| was able to show that people with lung cancer were far more
| likely than non-cancer controls to have smoked, a fact
| confirmed by Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schoniger at the
| University of Jena in an even more ambitious study from 1943.
| These German results were subsequently verified and amplified
| by UK and American scholars: in 1950 alone, five separate
| epidemiological studies were published, including papers by
| Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham in the USA and Richard Doll and
| A Bradford Hill in England. All confirmed this growing
| suspicion, that smokers of cigarettes were far more likely to
| contract lung cancer than non-smokers.
|
| So it's less a case of people intuiting what was bad for them
| and more a case of the industry trying (and for a few decades
| succeeding) to get ahead of a growing scientific consensus by
| advertising it into irrelevance.
|
| [0] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Point of Order: tobacco smoke was suspected of being harmful
| a couple centuries before the scientific method started to
| catch up to the suspicion. King James I famously penned a
| treatise against tobacco use in 1604 and slapped some
| eyewatering taxes on it's importation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Counterblaste_to_Tobacco
| lolinder wrote:
| That's true--lung cancer specifically was a concern that
| was growing at the time, which is almost certainly the
| impetus for this ad campaign--but you're right that it was
| strongly questioned for a long time before that.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| I don't understand why you think there would have been 0
| evidence. The countless respiratory illnesses associated with
| smoking are readily obvious by taking even a small sample of
| longterm smokers - a decent chunk of them will sound like
| smokers, be occasionally hacking up a lung, and so on.
|
| People obviously knew smoking was unhealthy, but chose to do so
| anyhow. And companies naturally worked to trt to strengthen
| that cognitive dissonance. Same thing today, but it's slightly
| more subtle. For instance in a typical Coke ad you'll generally
| see people that look nothing like regular Coke drinkers -
| health, fitness, and good body weights abounds.
|
| Ronaldo's Coke/water moment gave me a vast amount of respect
| for him -
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2ZLS1V3iMw&pp=ygUbUm9uYWxkbyd...
| It's how the sort of people Coke gets to pose with their
| product actually feel about it.
| HankB99 wrote:
| The T Zone
|
| T is for Taste ... T is fore Throat
|
| Just wow.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Oh but it gets so much worse:
| https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarette/img0742/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-09 23:01 UTC)