Smoking causes cancer

Most people are idiots. You can easily prove this because they will agree with the claim in the title. If you try to give them a counterexample — like, you know, the vast majority of smokers not having cancer — they will counter it by "well, it doesn't cause cancer right away". Causality doesn't work like that; it's a "if X, then Y" relationship. Don't use the word if you mean something other than that; say "smoking increases the probability of getting cancer" (yes it does).

As an additional counterexample to the claim, here's something most people will disagree with: passing under a ladder brings bad luck. Mark Twain had a humorous take on this: a character tells another "X passed under a ladder and only six months later he fell and broke his arm" (I'm quoting from memory). That's exactly the same type of "causality" as in the case of smoking: you do X, then long after that bad thing Y happens, and you claim Y is caused by X. This is pure superstition; most people know that in the case of the ladder, but not in the case of smoking.

As for why: as usual, it's because of religion. Most people, as I said, are idiots and they prefer not to think; being told what to think is easier for them. Since the high priests of the current reigning religion of the world (aka science) tell them that walking under ladders does not cause bad luck, they accept it; when the priests tell them that smoking does cause cancer, they accept that too.

As I have mentioned before, I have lost my faith in education as a weapon against this kind of stupidity. People today are infinitely more educated than those living a hundred years ago and they still have the same lack of desire to challenge their own opinions (Paul Graham has a great article about this). This conflicts with my powerful belief that humanity always improves socially long-term (we're better now than a hundred years ago and so on), so that's a contradiction I haven't solved yet.

Oh well; end of rant. As the non-A adepts say, be precise; if you believe that smoking is bad because it negatively affects one's health, say that; saying "smoking kills" is more emotional but also incredibly stupid.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Posting dynamic Master / Detail forms with Knockout

Image
I have the following dynamic form in my GitHub Inventory project : I created the form with KnockoutJS , using some ideas from this article . The detail view looks like this: <table id="acquisition_items" class="jtable"> <thead> <tr> <th>Product Name</th> <th>Quantity</th> <th>Price</th> <th>Value</th> <th><button data-bind="click: addItem">[+]</button></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody data-bind="foreach: items"> <tr> <td> <input data-bind="value: ProductName" type="text" value="" /> </td> <td> <input data-bind="value: Quantity" type="text" value="" /> </td> <td>
Read more

Comparing Excel files, take two

Image
I already wrote this project once, on GitHub , but I can't say that I like the result. I wrote that code without TDD, mostly to see if I can still work in the "normal" fashion. I can, but I had a bug that took me a while to even discover and then was difficult to write tests for. I also hate the temporal dependency in that design (if you don't call the SortBy method first, the ExcludeRecords method will return incorrect results). Anyway; here's attempt number two, writing that code using TDD. Structure I start by creating my usual structure for projects of this type - a library for the logic, a console application for the main program and a test project for tests. I also use the Enable NuGet Package Restore option (right-click on the solution node) to add the three NuGet files that will allow someone to automatically download all the packages I'm referencing without wasting space in the source code repository. (Right now I've only added the Moq pa
Read more

EF Code First: seeding with foreign keys

This is just a quick tip, more for future reference for myself than anything else. When using Entity Framework Code First, one of the things you might want to do while developing the application is to seed your database with some test data. This can be something as easy as: protected override void Seed(InventoryDB context) { context.Products.AddOrUpdate( p => p.Name, new Product { Name = "Hammer", SalePrice = 11.99m, }, new Product { Name = "Nail Pack x100", SalePrice = 0.05m, }, new Product { Name = "Saw", SalePrice = 19.99m, }, new Product { Name = "Toolkit", SalePrice = 39.99m, } ); //... } (I am using the AddOrUpdate method so the code detects whether those products already exist and doesn't add them again if they do.) The Product class is quite simple and – most importantly – doesn't depend on any other: public class Product { public int Id { g
Read more