I’m disappointed this is the first comment on this post.

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

Meh. Writing like this was formative for me (before Gwern; I'm old), but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else. It just manifests in a different way?

It boils down to an obvious disparity in the standard of proof they demand for "pet" topics versus what they need for everything else. You can do this kind of ultra-nitpicky "rational inquiry" to undermine anything you don't like. You can use it to argue against seatbelts. Or against the ban on lead paint. Was lead paint really all that bad?... and I mean, really? Are there studies? Are they high quality enough?... Double-blind? Confounding factors? Correlation or causation? Even if they look solid, I bet they contain enough errors to cast doubt. Cui bono? What was the role of the titanium dioxide lobby in all this?

For nicotine specifically, I've been around enough people seriously addicted to nicotine to just roll my eyes at this stuff. I had things thrown at me by a visibly jittery relative when I refused to smuggle cigarettes into a hospital. Do I have a published double-blind study showing that it's worse than coffee? No. But again, neither do rationalists for 99% of the stuff they believe in.

Do I think that vapes are a noteworthy problem to be focusing on? Maybe not, but public policy is always to some extent vibe-based. And the harm of being too heavy-handed on vapes is really not something that keeps me up at night.

They insinuated that the ordinary vapes caused serious lung injury. The blame lay elsewhere, but you think it's fine to shift it around to your preferred target.

No. I was answering to parent's broader comment about "formative" writings on nicotine. And I was making my own broader point that the NYT piece is biased, but selective evidence-seeking in the rationalist community doesn't deserve any special praise.

> Meh. Writing like this was formative for me (before Gwern; I'm old), but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else. It just manifests in a different way?

Could you point out to some examples? Is there any "rational inquiry" that shows a worldview bias from the rationalists, in your opinion?

I agree that the broader smarty-pants community may have this issue, just curious to read your examples.

I think this nicely pointed out in "The Big Bang Theory", where Sheldon Cooper says something like "If I would be wrong, don't you think I would know about it?" That sounds like something Elmo M would say with a serious face.

Rationalists are not necessarily better at thinking than you are, they're just usually better cited. That isn't to say there isn't value in being able to cite your beliefs, but if you try very hard you can find data that justifies just about anything, omit nontrivial externalities, and expect any arbitrarily high standard of evidence because that is what you need to think well and good, when in fact they just spend more time being comfortable with conversations that involve p-values and metacognition than you are and will seek to draw you onto their home turf for that discussion.

In this case, for example, I doubt that Gwern is seeking to mislead, but I have heard (hearsay, I know) that there are people who read this, start vaping, and legitimately end up with nicotine additions from much worse stuff. Sure, there's nothing false said here, but you can definitely say only true things about vapes and neglect to mention that your readers of this have ended up more likely to die of lung cancer than they might have had you not published this. I think someone who was truly rationalist would find that in itself an interesting topic of conversation but it seems to rarely come up that being super pedantic often leads to negative outcomes because presumably this would make them shine a mirror at themselves in a way that they are almost intentionally incapable of discussing.

>but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else.

In other words, uninitialized intellectuals are just plebs with a degree or browse HN or worse reddit. They become nice "mouth pieces" for the businesses to mobilize the masses in the name of "science" or "social justice".

> But please don’t take up the first comment on a gwern post to cheap shot the NYTs

I apologize for my lazy attack on NYT. Here is a more thorough attack:

An Algerian immigrant stabs 3 Irish children. NYT calls this a "rumour" that started a riot. Strictly speaking it was a rumour - it just happened to be true. Something the NYT omitted:

The violence in Ireland’s capital on Thursday night was fueled by far-right agitators who spread rumors online about an attack on three children earlier that day. - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/world/europe/dublin-riots...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Dublin_riot

NY Times title when a "story" (schoolyard scuffle apparently worthy of national attention) broke:

A Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks at a Playground - https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytim...

The title after the story turned out to be a hoax:

Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault, and Family Apologizes - https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytim...

NY Times title after an islamic terrorist beheaded a teacher near Paris: French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street - https://web.archive.org/web/20201016193107/https://www.nytim...

When Trump did not penalize the Saudis after the Khashoggi killing, the Times said Trump’s decision was “a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.” - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/world/middleeast/trump-sa...

When Biden did the same: "For Mr. Biden, the decision was a telling indication of how his more cautious instincts kicked in, as the responsibilities of managing a difficult ally led him to find ways other than going directly after Prince Mohammed to make Saudi Arabia pay a price." - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/us/politics/biden-mbs-kha...

When the muslim immigrant Ahmad Al Alawi Alissa killed 10 people in Boulder, Colorado, the shooter is referred to as a "gunman whose motives remain a mystery":

‘I Know She’s Gone, but Why?’: Love and Loss at a Boulder Grocery Store - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/us/colorado-shooting-fune...

Gunman Kills 10 in Grocery Store - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/us/boulder-colorado-shoot...

One of the few stories by the Times that identifies the mass killer is titled "An Immigrant Family Caught Up in a Distinctly American Tragedy" - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/us/boulder-gunman-alissa....

But they're not shy about leading with race when white women do.. something: "How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror" - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/opinion/racism-white-wome...

I could list 3x as many examples, but there are only so many hours in the day for arguing online, so I hope this will suffice.

Some people might not realize there's a /s in there.