All the other bullshit aside, this isn’t a hot take. This is the majority opinion on lemmy.

Oh jeez I’m old

Not because I was around when this stuff was invented but because I went to school way back when they actually taught you stuff, including when things were invented

More salient takeaway is, don’t use a LLM to translate a scientific paper. Because it can’t translate a scientific paper. It can only rewrite the entire paper, in a different language. And it will introduce misunderstandings and hallucinations.

The exception is my country won’t deport me to a death camp for it.

Wanna bet?

Fascism is a virus, it doesn’t contain itself to one country.

or is it?

No

Hope this helps

Christians

Do you think that Juul or Phillip Morris or whatever wouldn’t fund studies that said vape is harmless?

Absolutely! Cigarettes are the money makers. Vapes have been eating into their profits. When vapes are restricted, cigarette usage goes way up.

I’ve linked 4 or 5 studies so far which seem to indicate that nicotine has cancer promoting effects

The problem as I’ve mentioned is these studies will have titles and abstracts that say vapes are more dangerous than fentanyl, but the actual science doesn’t support that conclusion. Typically the study will show that vapes can cause cancer in some way, but completely fail to give any context for how dangerous it is in comparison with other environmental factors. In the worst case, they’ll actually cook the books with insane concentrations of nicotine or outrageous assumptions about vape use. Well I guess the worst case was that one study which literally fabricated data, but that’s an outlier.

if you actually believe the fox news ass all men are rapists line

I heard that first-hand from women on this site.

you wouldn’t argue if I said all bears are dangerous

Yeah no shit, that’s the point.

So far, the only sketchy science I’ve seen has been people trying to claim vapes are killing our children. It’s a classic moral hysteria. Every. Single. Case. Of kids being harmed by vapes has been sketchy Chinese shit, which they wouldn’t try to get if you people weren’t so insistent on banning vapes in the US!

I’m arguing that vapes are less harmful than alcohol, fast food, or car exhaust. Less harmful than sitting at a desk all day. Less harmful than any of a thousand things people do daily. This absolute hysteria around vaping needs to end.

And it’s less a conspiracy than a social movement - if you want funding, find vapes to be harmful. If you want your career destroyed, tell the truth. I don’t think there’s a cabal of evil moustache-twirling scientists; I think there’s a very powerful social and financial incentive to come to certain conclusions.

Sure, I agree. But it’s SO MUCH LESS than tobacco that we should not view them as in the same ballpark.

No withdawal - I’m vaping right now.

Vapes saved me from an early death due to smoking and it bothers me on a personal level when people spout falsehoods about them. And on a civic level when those people are government officials.

Like I said, I don’t fully buy into it, but the facts are incontrovertible and it’s a fairly compelling argument.

can you explain the concepts of p-value and statistical significance for me?

Literally irrelevant to the point I’m making.

Also, do things existing at less than 0.04 mg have no effect on the human body?

In almost every case, that’s correct.

Keep in mind that’s also the strongest measured concentration of the biggest clouds in the whole study, and that assumes instead of passively breathing in someone else’s vape cloud, they’re just breathing the whole thing right into your mouth. Realistic amounts of chemicals would be an order or two magnitude lower.

Oh Christ on a cracker, I don’t have time to explain how math works

Only up to 100 mg? Such a tiny amount of substance

The entire cloud, water vapor and all, is up to 100mg, dumbass. It’s like 0.04mg of chemicals in the biggest vape clouds. That’s nothing.

Yeah no fucking shit, Sherlock

I was referring to IRL safe spaces and support groups.

Making men’s spaces online specifically has the dual problem of being attacked by both misogynists and radical feminists. It’s a lot of work and a lot of hate to deal with, so they don’t pop up a lot. But yes, they do exist, there’s a semi-active menslib community on lemmy for example. I think that one veers way too heavily into the “us men are really awful aren’t we?” feminist takes, personally; the reddit one was a lot better.

The other stuff in vape clouds is such an infinitesimally small amount, it’s really not worth considering. On the order of like <400 migrograms per gram of vape cloud, with the average vape cloud mass being <100mg

Wikipedia

Study that I was able to access through my university

The scientific failings of nearly all research into e-cigs is a big pet peeve of mine. So, so many studies with abstracts and titles shouting VAPES WILL LITERALLY KILL YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN IF YOU LOOK AT THEM and then when you dig into the results it’s less harmful than ambient air in a Walmart.

I saw a great long-form article with a theory that I don’t completely buy into but is very interesting.

In 1998, a MASSIVE lawsuit against the tobacco companies was settled. The result was the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). Due to the harmful public health effects of tobacco, cigarette companies were required to pay huge sums to the state governments, in perpetuity, based on the level of sales of cigarettes. To be clear, this was a great and reasonable idea, given the public health costs associated with smoking (funny enough, since then, costs have lowered on average as people live longer but smokers don’t).

Several states then “securitized” their future payments and sold them off to get short-term injections of cash. If the term “securitization” seems familiar, it’s the craze that led to the financial collapse in 2008, when people were securitizing junk mortgages. As part of these tobacco bond securitization agreements, states have to pay their business partners a certain dollar amount every year going forward, NOT based on the level of sales of cigarettes.

Then, for a variety of reasons including vaping, cigarette sales started to tank. Meaning states were getting less money from the MSA, but they still owed the same amount to their debtors. Many of these bonds are in junk status, and some states are realistically looking at bankruptcy due to that stupid decision 20 years ago. There’s $97 billion they owe in total, and most states have no way to pay it.

So now we have a large number of state governments with an extremely powerful financial incentive to suppress vaping and encourage cigarette smoking.

I also give no fucks, so here we are.

Ooh boy, it’s time to link to my favorite “I did a lot of work and no one responded” pair of posts, with a deep dive into how the NIH and other offices’ claims about nicotine are utter bullshit and a great example of the failures of the modern scientific apparatus: https://lemmy.world/post/16434400/10677530

My favorite parts:

There’s stuff like this heart.org result, which exclusively talk about “smoking and nicotine”. These types of articles are dangerous in and of themselves because they require a level of critical thinking to separate out “smoking” and “nicotine”. A lot of anti-vaping hit pieces have a top-level title talking about nicotine, but then the body of the article references negative effects that are exclusive to smoking. Here’s one such hit piece, run by a dystopian-sounding group called the “Truth Initiative” which should immediately make anyone suspicious of their goals. Note the article is under topic “harmful effects of tobacco”, subtopic “nicotine addiction”.

So like, they took the high end of that study they referenced, increased it a little, used that as the low end of their study, made their high end 4 times that, and then gave that amount to a fucking mouse injected with a human tumor. And then did it again, 5 more times a day. And then said that “mimicked the daily intakes of cigarettes in smokers”. HAH.

Side note: see how incestuous this all is? We have a study of studies (NIH) referencing a study of studies (Jensen) referencing a study of studies (Chowdhury), referencing…nothing at all.